Saint Anselm College

About: Saint Anselm College is a education organization based out in Manchester, New Hampshire, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Nurse education & Extinction (psychology). The organization has 255 authors who have published 522 publications receiving 7222 citations.

Why Is the Universe Comprehensible

Abstract: Why is the universe comprehensible? How is it that we can come to know its regularities well enough to exploit them for our own gain? In this essay I argue that the nature of our comprehension lies in the mutually agreed upon methodology we use to attain that comprehension and on the basic stability of the universe. But I also argue that the very act of comprehension itself places constraints on what we can comprehend by forcing us to establish a context for our knowledge. In this way the universe has managed to conspire to make itself objectively comprehensible to subjective observers.

Las Cortes de Castilla y León bajo los Austrias: Una interpretación

Abstract: Jose Ignacio Fortea Perez, Las Cortes de Castilla y Leon bajo los Austrias: Una interpretacion (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y Leon, 2008), Paperback €25, 384 pp., ISBN 978-84-9718-561-5 In this v...

Nonergodic Brownian oscillator

Abstract: We consider an open (Brownian) classical harmonic oscillator in contact with a non-Markovian thermal bath and described by the generalized Langevin equation. When the bath's spectrum has a finite upper cutoff frequency, the oscillator may have ergodic and nonergodic configurations. In ergodic configurations (when they exist, they correspond to lower oscillator frequencies) the oscillator demonstrates conventional relaxation to thermal equilibrium with the bath. In nonergodic configurations (which correspond to higher oscillator frequencies) the oscillator in general does not thermalize but relaxes to periodically correlated (cyclostationary) states whose statistics vary periodically in time. For a specific dissipation kernel in the Langevin equation, we evaluate explicitly relevant relaxation functions, which describe the evolution of mean values and time correlations. When the oscillator frequency is switched from a lower value to higher one, the oscillator may show parametric ergodic to nonergodic transitions with equilibrium initial and cyclostationary final states. These transitions are shown to resemble phase transitions of the second kind.