Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 241 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-241).

Traditionally, in the landscape profession, landscape analysis has been concerned with the physical aspects of place. Properties like shape, amount, use, colour and content have been surveyed, identified and classed in their various combinations to describe ' place character '. With few exceptions, (Appleton 1998), the psychological aspects of place as criteria for classification have been largely ignored. One of the reasons for this, has been the argument that such data are' subjective' and personal, when what is required is,' objective', verifiable and subject to 'constancy'. Another equally valid objection has been the difficulty in defining and identifying the psychological properties of place. The proposed method of analysing places by their psychological properties depends on people being able to verbally describe their feelings and states of mind. To define the survey parameters, these personal, emotional and mental properties have been identified and arranged in spectrums. By selecting the appropriate terms to describe their feelings in place, psychological profiles can be prepared, describing person-place relationships. With many such profiles, linked to personal details, like age, activity, sex and culture, factor analysis allows statistical examinations to be made of these person-place relationships. These reveal consistent patterns, relating particular combinations of feelings to particular combinations of perceivable place properties. Language is the medium of analysis and a linguistic examination of the data allows its classification into different types of place property. Those which are tangible, nominals and nouns, like apples, beds and chairs, and those which are intangible and descriptors, like abnormality, banality and chaos. Linguistics also offers, through concepts like antonymy, the ability to express opposites or contrasts in design terms, like, alien-friendly, bold-weak, chaotic-ordered. Certain combinations of emotions and perceivable, intangible place properties indicate places of particular significance. These are defined as archetypes. Thus, Arcadia is emotionally peaceful, restful and tranquil, and perceivably fertile, productive and beautiful. Battlefield is tense, shocking, stressful and perceivably brutal, chaotic and dramatic. CG Jung, (1968) asserted that anthropomorphic archetypes exist in the 'collective unconscious' of society and that this innate knowledge prepares the mind for future encounters. His archetypes included concepts like Mother and Father, Superman and Hero. By extension, it is postulated that places are also archetypal. To relate people to places objectively, the concept of 'objective relativity' is evoked ( G H Mead. 1932), allowing personal properties like awe, beauty and calmness to be logically attributed to place, relative to particular people. The main concept on which the thesis is based, is 'Psychospace', a linguistic model of the total psychological experience of place. New concepts are created to describe further people-place relationships. Prattles are property feelings of people attributed to place and Percies are properties of place perceived by some people and not others, and therefore 'subjective', like order, chaos and formality. Also included in 'subjective' judgements are those of assessment. Procons are personal properties, like quality and value, good, bad and satisfactory, but also objectively relative. Methods are proposed for the analysis of places and people and the identification of concepts which are employed in the processes of design. Examples are shown and discussed of how the formulated principles work in practice.

Orientador: Bruto Max Pimentel Escobar / Banca: Herculano da Silva Martinho / Banca: Antonio Soares de Castro / Banca: Angsula Ghosh / Banca: Josif Frenkel / Resumo: Esta tese apresenta o estudo do espaço-tempo não comutativo em teoria quântica de campos e matéria condensada mole, comum a aplicação em física biológica. No que concerne a teoria quântica de campos, a quantização da eletrodinâmica quântica não comutativa em (1+1) − e(2+1) − dimensões através da representação espectral de Källén-Lehmann foi realizada com o intuito de se buscar efeitos não comutativos à massa dos fótons, que no contexto de baixas dimensões, é gerada dinamicamente em duas dimensões e surge a partir do termo topológico de Chern-Simons no caso tridimensional. Para isso, as contribuições de 1 e 2 partículas para a função de densidade espectral foram consideradas, permitindo que se extraíssem o propagador livre e sua primeira correção, respectivamente. Em física da matéria condensada mole, foi proposto um modelo para o estudo da anomalia do calor específico em temperaturas intermediárias de sólidos desordenados para uma rede cristalina definida em um espaço não comutativo. Nesta nova interpretação, as posições de cada átomo de uma rede são não comutativas, o que equivale a afirmar que a posição de cada átomo é livre dentro de uma célula espacial definida pela álgebra não comutativa. A invariância por translações espaciais assegurada pela teoria não comutativa permitiu a construção de uma rede bidimensional e também estruturas tridimensionais, ambas compostas por átomos idênticos. Foi constatado o surpreendente surgimento de modos óticos em consequência da não comutatividade das posições dos átomos. Uma singularidade proporcional ao parâmetro não comutativo 'teta' foi encontrada no espectro vibracional da rede, caracterizando uma singularidade de van Hove, que por sua vez é a origem do pico de Bóson presente na curva de calor específico reduzido. No limite em que 'teta'→0, mostrou-se que existe um incremento em calor específico para a curva... / Abstract: This thesis presents the study of noncommutative spacetime in quantum field theory and soft condensed matter, with an application in biological physics. As regards the quantum theory of fields, the quantization of the noncommutative quantum electrodynamics in (1+1) − and(2+1) − dimensions through the Källén-Lehmann spectral representation was performed to seek for noncommutative effects to the mass of the photon. In the context of lower dimensions it is dynamically generated in two dimensions and arises from the topological Chern-Simons term in three-dimensional case. Therefore, the contributions of 1 and 2 particles to the spectral density function were considered, allowing one to obtain from the full propagator provided by the Källén-Lehmann spectral representation, the free propagator and its first correction. In physics of soft condensed matter, a model was built for studying the specific heat anomaly at intermediate temperatures of disordered solids from a new interpretation of noncommutative space. In this new interpretation, the position of each atom that belongs to a lattice are noncommutative, which is to say that the position of each atom is free within a cell space defined by a noncommutative algebra. The invariance under spatial translations assured by the noncommutative theory allowed the construction of two-dimensional lattice and three-dimensional structures composed by identical atoms. The surprising emergence of optical modes as a result of the noncommutativity of the position of atoms was observed. A singularity proportional to the noncommutative parameter 'teta' was found in the vibrational spectrum of a lattice, featuring a van Hove singularity, conversely the origin of the boson peak at reduced specific heat curve. There is an increase in the specific heat curve with 'teta'=0 in the limit where 'teta'→0, which can be attributed to optical modes that have arisen... / Doutor

The study of geodesics in space-time is essential to a comprehensive understanding of the physics of the field. Global properties, e.g. the singularity structure and completeness of space-time, can be related to the geodesic properties, thus it is through the solutions of the geodesic equation of motion that many of the global properties of space-time can be obtained in an easily interpretable form. However, it is usually very difficult to integrate the geodesic equations for the particle motion in the presence of a gravitational field (Introduction, p. 1)

This work discusses aspects of a fundamental problem in the theory of quantum fields on curved spacetimes - that of giving physical meaning to the particle representations of the theory. In particular, the response of model particle detectors is analysed in detail. Unruh (1976) first introduced the idea of a model particle detector in order to give an operational definition to particles. He found that even in flat spacetime, the excitation of a particle detector does not necessarily correspond to the presence of an energy carrier - an accelerating detector will excite in response to the zero-energy state of the Minkowski vacuum. The central question I consider in this work Is - where does the energy for the excitation of the accelerating detector come from? The accepted response has been that the accelerating force provides the energy. Evaluating the energy carried by the (conformally-invariant massless scalar) field after the Interaction with the detector, however, I find that the detector excitation is compensated by an equal but opposite emission of negative energy. This result suggests that there may be states of lesser energy than that of the Minkowski vacuum. To resolve this paradox, I argue that the emission of a detector following a more realistic trajectory than that of constant acceleration - one that starts and finishes in inertial motion - will in total be positive, although during periods of constant acceleration the detector will still emit negative energy. The Minkowski vacuum retains its status as the field state of lowest energy. The second question I consider is' the response of Unruh's detector in curved spacetime - is it possible to use such a detector to measure the energy carried by the field? In the particular case of a detector following a Killing trajectory, I find that there is a response to the energy of the field, but that there is also an inherent 'noise'. In a two dimensional model spacetime, I show that this 'noise' depends on the detector's acceleration and on the curvature of the spacetime, thereby encompassing previous results of Unruh (1976) and of Gibbons & Hawking (1977). / Science, Faculty of / Physics and Astronomy, Department of / Graduate

This thesis is devoted to developing a group-theoretical approach towards quantum gravity in (Anti)-de Sitter spacetime. We start with a comprehensive review of the representation theory of de Sitter (dS) isometry group, focusing on the construction of unitary irreducible representations and the computation of characters. The three chapters that follow present the results of novel research conducted as a graduate student. Chapter 4 is based on [1]. We provide a general algebraic construction of higher spin quasinormal modes of de Sitter horizon and identify the boundary operator insertions that source the quasinormal modes from a local QFT point of view. Quasinormal modes of a single higher spin field in dSD furnish two nonunitary lowest-weight representations of the dS isometry group SO(1,D). We also show that quasinormal mode spectrums of higher spin fields are precisely encoded in the Harish-Chandra characters of the corresponding SO(1,D) unitary irreducible representations. Chapter 5 is based on work with D. Anninos, F. Denef and A. Law [2]. With potential application to constraining UV-complete microscopic models of de Sitter quantum gravity, we compute de Sitter entropy as the logarithm of the sphere path integral, for any possible low energy effective field theory containing a massless graviton, in arbitrary dimensions. The path integral is performed exactly at the one-loop level. The one-loop correction to the dS entropy is found to take a universal “bulk−edge” form, with the bulk part being an integral transformation of a Harish-Chandra character encoding quasinormal modes spectrum in a static patch of dS and the edge part being the same integral transformation of an edge character encoding degrees of freedom frozen on the dS horizon. In 3D de Sitter spacetime, the one-loop exact entropy is promoted to an all-loop exact result for truncated higher spin gravity, the latter admitting an SL(n,C) Chern-Simons formulation with n being the spin cut-off. Chapter 6 is based on [3]. Inspired by [2], we revisit the one-loop partition function of any higher spin field in (d + 1)-dimensional Anti-de Sitter spacetime and show that it can be universally expressed as an integral transform of an SO(2, d) bulk character and an SO(2, d − 2) edge character. We apply this character integral formula to various higherspin Vasiliev gravities and find miraculous (almost) cancellations between bulk and edge characters, leading to striking agreement with the predictions of higher spin holography. We also comment on the relation between our character integral formula and Rindler-AdS [4] thermal partition functions.

This dissertation seeks to examine the essential nature of time--both the concept in physics, biology, and philosophy, and the phenomenon in life and culture--with the ultimate goal of deepening our understanding of the empirical manifestation of time in human mental experience. It thus engages with both philosophy and with empirical science, natural as well as humanistic, in the paradigms of history, social theory, fundamental (or philosophical) anthropology, as well as with human neuroscience. The central argument is that while time is not an empirical phenomenon in physics - time itself is not an absolute quality of matter - one can make a certain argument for the real existence of time in biology, and still a different argument for a unique, linear phenomenon of time that derives from the specific human, cultural, experience. To make these arguments the dissertation devotes attention to the analysis of both the concept of time and the empirical phenomenon to which it refers successively in physics, biology, philosophy and history/sociology. Arriving at the conclusion that the linear concept of time (the causally significant relationship between the past, present and future) reflects a phenomenon that is uniquely human and suggests the ways in which this experience is necessarily reflected in the brain. / 2022-02-26T00:00:00Z

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published_or_final_version / abstract / Architecture / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy