The haptic perception of vertical, horizontal, +45 degrees oblique, and +135 degrees oblique orientations was studied in completely blind adults. The purpose was to determine whether the variations of the gravitational cues provided by the arm-hand system during scanning would affect the manifestation of the oblique effect (lower performance in oblique orientations than in vertical-horizontal o...

ABSTRACT With increasing sensitivities of the current ground-based gravitational wave (GW) detectors, prospects detecting a strongly lensed GW signal are going to be high in coming years. When such passes through an intervening lensing galaxy or cluster, embedded stellar mass microlenses lead interference patterns that may leave observable signatures. In this work, we present extensive study th...

We measured Newton's gravitational constant G using a new torsion balance method. Our technique greatly reduces several sources of uncertainty compared to previous measurements: (1) It is insensitive to anelastic torsion fiber properties; (2) a flat plate pendulum minimizes the sensitivity due to the pendulum density distribution; (3) continuous attractor rotation reduces background noise. We o...

Progress and plans are reported for a program of gravitational physics experiments using cryogenic torsion pendula undergoing large amplitude torsional oscillation. The program includes a UC Irvine project to measure the gravitational constant G and joint UC Irvine– U. Washington projects to test the gravitational inverse square law at a range of about 10 cm and to test the weak equivalence pri...

Multidimensional cosmological models with factorizable geometry and their dimensional reduction to effective four-dimensional theories are analyzed on sensitivity to different scalings. It is shown that a noncorrect gauging of the effective four-dimensional gravitational constant within the dimensional reduction results in a non-correct rescaling of the cosmological constant and the gravexciton...

Evidence is presented which indicates that almost all HCGs are dynamically associated with generally elongated loose groups of galaxies, and are compact cores of the latter. Most of those loose groups, the direction of elongation of which lies at angles close to 45◦ with the line of sight, were revealed by previous investigations. Hence, HCGs have, probably, longer life-times than it has been d...

Higher–dimensional theories imply that some constants, such as the gravitational constant and the strength of the gauge–couplings, are not fundamental constants. Instead they are related to the sizes of the extra–dimensional space, which are moduli fields in the four– dimensional effective theory. We study the cosmological evolution of the moduli fields appearing in brane world scenarios and di...