I begin with an explication of “thought experiment”. I then clarify the role that intuitions play in thought experiments by addressing two important issues: (1) the informativeness of thought experiments and (2) the legitimacy of the method of thought experiments in philosophy and the natural sciences. I defend a naturalistic account of intuitions that provides a plausible explanation of the in...

Medical services, like most services (haircuts, airfares), sell for different prices in the same local market. In contrast to gasoline, where the product is homogeneous and competition prevails, quality is uniform, and consumers are fairly efficient searchers, the medical care market would probably display price variation even if its products were not sometimes a matter of life and death and al...

the storage capacity of hydrogen on na-decorated born nitride nanotubes (bnnts) is investigated by using density functional theory within quantum espresso and gaussian 09. the results obtained predict that a single na atom tends to occupy above the central region of the hexagonal rings in (5,0) and (3,3) bnnt structures with a binding energy of -2.67 and -4.28 ev/na-atom respectively. when a si...

We propose a new method of detecting supersymmetry at LEP2 and the NLC when R-parity is violated by an LLĒ operator. We consider the processes eγ → ν̃jek and eγ → l̃kν̄j which can test seven of the nine LLĒ-operators. A Monte-Carlo analysis is performed to investigate the sensitivity to the sneutrino signal, and the 5σ discovery contours in the mν̃j vs. λ plane are presented. For an integrated lumi...

This paper relates to the construction and testing of a solarpowered golf cart and the future incorporation of a fuel cell system to the existing solar cart. The prototype built in 2004 [fig 1] proved to be very successful. The combination of unique features such as the tracking of the sun resulted in the increase of output power with respect to other solar carts. In addition, the cart turns in...

Electrostatic interactions play a central role in the assembly of single-stranded RNA viruses. Under physiological conditions of salinity and acidity, virus capsid assembly requires the presence of genomic material that is oppositely charged to the core proteins. In this paper we apply basic polymer physics and statistical mechanics methods to the self-assembly of a synthetic virus encapsidatin...

3d-Metal mononitrides are studied using the density functional theory method. The lowest spin state for these dimers is obtained using the B3LYP hybrid functional with the 6-311 G* basis set. The equilibrium geometries, vibrational frequencies, binding energies, Mulliken, and natural orbital population analysis charges, natural orbital electronic configuration, electron affinity, and ionization...