Kent A. Peacock

Strategic Defense Initiative

The Applied Physics Laboratory first became involved with the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) in April 1984. Seven programs were initiated, five of which have resulted in launches; another is nearing a launch date. The teamwork between SDIO and APL, along with many other subcontractors, began with the Delta 180 program, the fIrst in a series known as the Delta programs. The Delta series set new standards for accomplishing orbital missions in extremely short periods. Although the seven programs are somewhat diverse, the constant theme throughout was to understand and develop sensors that SDro could use in a deployed architecture and that could be used from ascent through the midcourse phase of a booster trajectory.

On the edge of a paradigm shift: Quantum nonlocality and the breakdown of peaceful coexistence

Abstract I present a thought experiment in quantum mechanics and tease out some of its implications for the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence”, which, following Shimony, I take to be the proposition that quantum mechanics does not force us to revise or abandon the relativistic picture of causality. I criticize the standard arguments in favour of peaceful coexistence on the grounds that they are question‐begging, and suggest that the breakdown of Lorentz‐invariant relativity as a principle theory would be a natural development, given the general trend of physics in this century.

The three faces of ecological fitness.

This paper argues that fitness is most usefully understood as those properties of organisms that are explanatory of survival in the broadest sense, not merely descriptive of reproductive success. Borrowing from Rosenberg and Bouchard (2009), fitness in this sense is ecological in that it is defined by the interactions between organisms and environments. There are three sorts of ecological fitness: the well-documented ability to compete, the ability to cooperate (as in mutualistic symbiosis), and a third sense of fitness that has received insufficient attention in evolutionary theory, the ability to construct. Following Lotka, it can be understood thermodynamically as the ability to maintain or enlarge the energy-circulating capacity of an ecosystem. An organism that does this could end with its gene frequency unchanged but its probability of survival enhanced since it would sustain or increase the total carrying capacity of its ecosystem. Photosynthesizers and other autotrophs are obvious candidates for organisms that are fit in the constructive sense, but any organisms, including heterotrophs, can exhibit constructive fitness if they have some mechanism for channeling external flows of free energy into their ecosystems. I will briefly examine the prospects for the human species in the light of these considerations.

Quantum Logic and the Unity of Science

This paper is an exploratory prolegomenon to the construction of a quantum logic that could shed some light on the thesis of the unity of science. We attempt to take account of the following factors, among others: the difficulty of saying just what a logic is, the startlingly simplequeerness of quantum mechanics from the classical point of view, the consequences of the breakdown of bivalence and individuation in quantum mechanics, and the implications of recent work in quantum computation for quantum logic. We tentatively endorse modal interpretations of quantum mechanics, and suggest that quantum computation points to ways in which quantum logic could be extended beyond the traditional Birkhoff-von Neumann lattice theoretic approach.

A Different Kind of Rigor:What Climate Scientists Can Learn From Emergency Room Doctors

ABSTRACT James Hansen and others have argued that climate scientists are often reluctant to speak out about extreme outcomes of anthropogenic carbonization. According to Hansen, such reticence lessens the chance of effective responses to these threats. With the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) as a case study, reasons for scientific reticence are reviewed. The challenges faced by scientists in finding the right balance between reticence and speaking out are both ethical and methodological. Scientists need a framework within which to find this balance. Such a framework can be found in the long-established practices of professional ethics.

Energy, Complexity, and the Singularity

This paper explores the relevance of ecological limitations such as climate change and resource exhaustion to the possibility of a technologically-mediated “intelligence explosion” in the near future. The imminent risks of global carbonization and loss of biodiversity, as well as the dependency of technological development on a healthy biosphere, are greatly underestimated by singularity theorists such as Ray Kurzweil. While development of information technology should continue, we cannot rely on hypothetical advances in AI to get us out of our present ecological bottleneck. Rather, we should do everything we can to foster human ingenuity, the one factor that has a record of generating the game-changing innovations that our species has relied upon to overcome survival challenges in our past.

Philosophy of Ecology Today

Publisher Summary This chapter provides reflections of the ecology on science, its history, and its applications to policy making and ethical choices. Ecology is a young science, having emerged as a discipline during the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is also contested ground, both because of the richness and complexity of its subject matter, and because of its close ties to important political and economic issues. The chapter focuses on philosophical questions about ecology and its history as a science, and on applications of ecology to environmental issues. One theme that makes an appearance quite often in the chapter is a sense of deep worry about the state of the world. Aside from the familiar and already troubling damage that humans continue to wreak on environment, from deforestation, soil depletion, desertification to the rapid decline of fisheries due to devastating over exploitation, it has become increasingly clear over the last decade that one is now conducting one of the most dangerous uncontrolled experiments in history: the increasingly rapid increase of atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. The implications of this experiment for climate, ocean levels, and ocean pH are truly frightening; still more frightening is the possibility that positive feedback may become too strong for people to stop these changes from reaching catastrophic levels.

Chapter 13: Temporal Presentness and the Dynamics of Spacetime1

Publisher Summary The purpose of this chapter is to pick up the threads of a debate about the ontology of becoming in spacetime that was triggered by a provocative article published by Nicholas Maxwell. This debate is an episode in a long dialog that goes back at least as far as the time of Parmenides and Heraclitus. The chapter argues that it is possible to do much better than is usually supposed in identifying structures that can both live within Minkowski spacetime and represent objective becoming. It also discusses whether such structures would necessarily contradict the principle of relativity and describes the impact of quantum mechanics on the problem of becoming.

Bub and the barriers to quantum ontology

Quantum mechanics is certainly the most successful physical theory known, if one defines success of a physical theory as predictive power over a large range of phenomena. Most of us (naı̈vely, perhaps?) value scientific theories not only for their pragmatic efficacy, however, but also for their ability to explain phenomena in terms of general principles. In this respect, quantum mechanics, at least in its orthodox Copenhagen formulation, may well be an utter failure—for while it is enormously effective in predicting what we can expect to observe, it offers us almost no clue at all (apart from the features of the mathematical formalism itself) as to why things turn out the way they do, and may even imply that this question makes no ultimate sense at all. After all, Schrödinger’s cat shows us that quantum mechanics cannot be talking about ordinary objects, even though it can make very reliable predictions about what will happen to a huge variety of ordinary objects (and some very extraordinary objects). Surely, we feel, a theory that is so predictively successful must be about something, if only we could figure out what that could be. In this book, the respected philosopher of physics Jeffrey Bub conducts us through a detailed and masterly review of some of the best work that has been done in the attempt to say what quantum mechanics could be about. I’ll summarize (very sketchily) the contents of this rich book and then offer a few comments. Bub begins with some personal notes recounting high points of his career. After studying mathematics and physics as an undergraduate, he was “hooked” on foundations of quantum mechanics when he encountered the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox. A scholarship took him to Birkbeck College and work with David Bohm, to whom Bub acknowledges his “most important intellectual debt” (p. xiii). Bohm and Bub published in 1966 a no-collapse proposal for the solution of the measurement problem. (Their theory, unlike Bohm’s better-known theory of 1952 based on the quantum potential and guidance condition, does predict small differences from orthodox quantum mechanics.) Not long after, at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, Bub was introduced to quantum logic and von Neumann’s tantalizing suggestion that

Superluminal Transformations in Spacetimes of Definite Metric

This paper reviews and extends an approach to superluminal kinematics set forth by R. Sutherland and J. Shepanski (Phys. Rev. D 11(8), 2896 (1986)). This theory is characterized by a spacetime with positive definite metric, a Lorentz factor of the form , and real-valued proper times and proper lengths for superluminal reference frames.