Naturalness

About: Naturalness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1305 publications have been published within this topic receiving 31737 citations.

Relations between naturalness and perceived restorativeness of different urban green spaces

Abstract: Green spaces have positive effects on human well-being and quality of life in cities. So far, studies in this field mainly compared preferences for, and outcomes of contact with, natural vs. built environments. Less attention has been given to the study of the psychological effects of contact with green spaces differing in their degree of naturalness. This paper thus aims at understanding the relation between ecological (e.g., level of naturalness) and psychological factors (e.g., perceived restorativeness) in shaping evaluations of different urban and peri-urban green spaces. Five typologies of green space have been identified in the city of Bari (southern Italy), ranging from minimum (i.e., high level of man-made elements) to maximum levels of naturalness (i.e., low level of man-made elements). A set of pictures of the different urban green space typologies was shown to fifty undergraduate students of the University of Bari, and then measures of perceived restorativeness were taken. Results show...

Intersecting variables and perceived sexual orientation in men

Abstract: Sociolinguistic styles tie linguistic resources together into clusters and link them to social contexts of times, groups, places, and activities. Perceptions of masculinity and sexual orientation represent a well-studied area on sociolinguistic perception, offering many variables with potentially relevant social meanings. This study examines social perceptions of guises created by intersecting three masculinity-relevant variables: pitch, /s/-fronting or backing, and (ING). First, 110 online respondents provided descriptions and naturalness ratings of speech samples that were digitially modified to include the different variants; next, 175 respondents rated the speakers on six-point scales based on the terms "smart," "knowledgeable," "masculine," "gay," "friendly," "laid-back," "country," "educated," and "confident." The results showed that /s/-fronting carries strong social meaning across multiple speakers and other linguistic cues, making speakers sound less masculine, more gay and less competent. As documented elsewhere, use of the (ING) variants -ing and -in made speakers sound more or less competent, respectively. The combination of /s/-fronting and (ING), and, independently, /s/-backing, showed more complex effects, shifting relationships between multiple percepts. Taken together, these results provide some support for style-based sociolinguistic models, but also underline the need for more sophisticated statistical treatments of covariation in social perception.

Towards a natural theory of dark energy: Supersymmetric large extra dimensions

Abstract: The first part of this article summarizes the evidence for Dark Energy and Dark Matter, as well as the naturalness issues which plague current theories of Dark Energy. The main point of this part is to argue why these naturalness issues should provide the central theoretical guidance for the search for a successful theory. The second part of the article describes the present status of what I regard as being the best mechanism yet proposed for addressing this issue: Six‐dimensional Supergravity with submillimetre‐sized Extra Dimensions (Supersymmetric Large Extra Dimensions, or SLED for short). Besides summarizing the SLED proposal itself, this section also describes the tests which this model has passed, the main criticisms which have been raised, and the remaining challenges which remain to be checked. The bottom line is that the proposal survives the tests which have been completed to date, and predicts several distinctive experimental signatures for cosmology, tests of gravity and for accelerator‐based particle physics.

Naturalness Under Stress

Abstract: Naturalness has for many years been a guiding principle in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model, particularly for understanding the physics of electroweak symmetry breaking. However, the discovery of the Higgs particle at 125 GeV, accompanied by the exclusion of many types of new physics expected in natural models, has called the principle into question. In addition, apart from the scale of weak interactions, there are other quantities in nature that appear unnaturally small and for which we have no proposal for a natural explanation. I first review the principle, then discuss some of the conjectures it has spawned. I then turn to some of the challenges to the naturalness idea and consider alternatives.

Softened gravity and the extension of the standard model up to infinite energy

Abstract: Attempts to solve naturalness by having the weak scale as the only breaking of classical scale invariance have to deal with two severe difficulties: gravity and the absence of Landau poles We show that solutions to the first problem require premature modifications of gravity at scales no larger than 1011 GeV, while the second problem calls for many new particles at the weak scale To build models that fulfill these properties, we classify 4- dimensional Quantum Field Theories that satisfy Total Asymptotic Freedom (TAF): the theory holds up to infinite energy, where all coupling constants flow to zero We develop a technique to identify such theories and determine their low-energy predictions Since the Standard Model turns out to be asymptotically free only under the unphysical conditions g 1 = 0, M t = 186 GeV, M τ = 0, M h = 163 GeV, we explore some of its weak-scale extensions that satisfy the requirements for TAF