The progression of theories suggested for our world, from egoto geoto helio-centric models to universe and multiverse theories and beyond, shows one tendency: The size of the described worlds increases, with humans being expelled from their center to ever more remote and random locations. If pushed too far, a potential theory of everything (TOE) is actually more a theories of nothing (TON). Ind...

In this paper, we describe a system, called TheoryBase, whose goal is to facilitate experimental studies of nonmonotonic reasoning systems. TheoryBase generates test default theories and logic programs. It has an identiication system for generated theories, which allows us to reconstruct a logic program or a default theory from its identiier. Hence, exchanging test cases requires only exchangin...

Although the leading-order scaling of entanglement entropy is nonuniversal at a quantum critical point (QCP), sub-leading scaling can contain universal behaviour. Such universal quantities are commonly studied in noninteracting field theories, however it typically requires numerical calculation to access them in interacting theories. In this paper, we use large-scale T = 0 quantum Monte Carlo s...

We bootstrap N = (1, 0) superconformal field theories in six dimensions, by analyzing the four-point function of flavor current multiplets. Assuming E8 flavor group, we present universal bounds on the central charge CT and the flavor central charge CJ . Based on the numerical data, we conjecture that the rank-one E-string theory saturates the universal lower bound on CJ , and numerically determ...

In this paper, I employ a feminist methodology of social criticism for political theory to ask what theory or theories of human rights are visible in women’s human rights activism and whether these theories can be useful tools of cross-cultural and intra-cultural social criticism. I find a critical theory of human rights. This theory of universal immanent human rights is non-foundational and ye...

This paper concerns open, closed, and open-closed topological conformal field theories. We show that the category of open topological conformal field theories, at all genera, is homotopy equivalent to a category of Calabi-Yau A∞ categories. For each such, we show that there is a universal closed TCFT, which is the initial element in the category of compatible open-closed TCFTs. The homology of ...

To what degree do conceptual systems reflect universal patterns of featural covariation in the world (similarity) or universal organizing principles of mind, and to what degree do they reflect specific goals, theories, and beliefs of the categorizer? This question was addressed in experiments concerned with categorization and reasoning among different types of tree experts (e.g., taxonomists, l...

For the purposes of this chapter I take Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM) to be the unitary formalism of quantum mechanics divested of any probability interpretation, but including decoherence theory and the analysis of the universal state in terms of emergent, quasiclassical histories, or branches, along with their branch amplitudes, all entering into a vast superposition. I shall not be conc...

Suppose that λ = λ<λ ≥ א0, and we are considering a theory T . We give a criterion on T which is sufficient for the consistent existence of λ++ universal models of T of size λ+ for models of T of size ≤ λ+, and is meaningful when 2λ + > λ++. In fact, we work more generally with abstract elementary classes. The criterion for the consistent existence of universals applies to various well known th...

We explore the properties of dark matter in theories with two universal extra dimensions, where the lightest Kaluza-Klein state is a spin-0 neutral particle, representing a six-dimensional photon polarized along the extra dimensions. Annihilation of this ‘spinless photon’ proceeds predominantly through Higgs boson exchange, and is largely independent of other Kaluza-Klein particles. The measure...