Nature of Order

From the sea horse that mates in an hypnotic underwater ballet to the rodent who copulates until he literally drops dead, THE NATURE OF SEX spans the globe to illustrate how an astonishing diversity of life forms find their mates and conceive, raise, and protect their offspring. This Web companion to the four-part series takes a close look at the primal instinct that causes animals to come together in order to pass along their genes to the next generation.

Christina Maria Tonauer finds novel evidence for the first-order nature of the transition between high-density amorphous ice (HDA) and low-density amorphous ice (LDA), supporting water’s liquid-liquid transition scenarios. Pressure-dependent crystallisation experiments of differently prepared expanded high-density amorphous ice samples (eHDA) and subsequent powder x-ray diffraction experiments disclose nucleation of LDA domains in bulk HDA, a typical feature of a first-order transition. The comparison of pressure-dependent crystallisation temperatures of eHDA samples with LDA nuclei and bulk LDA allows the estimation of the Laplace pressure and the size of a LDA nucleus.

From the sea horse that mates in an hypnotic underwater ballet to the rodent who copulates until he literally drops dead, THE NATURE OF SEX spans the globe to illustrate how an astonishing diversity of life forms find their mates and conceive, raise, and protect their offspring. This Web companion to the four-part series takes a close look at the primal instinct that causes animals to come together in order to pass along their genes to the next generation. We also examine how timing can be key in the mating process, and how varied sex contracts create not only new life, but diversity, in both animals and humans.

Christina Maria Tonauer finds novel evidence for the first-order nature of the transition between high-density amorphous ice (HDA) and low-density amorphous ice (LDA), supporting water’s liquid-liquid transition scenarios. Pressure-dependent crystallisation experiments of differently prepared expanded high-density amorphous ice samples (eHDA) and subsequent powder x-ray diffraction experiments disclose nucleation of LDA domains in bulk HDA, a typical feature of a first-order transition. The comparison of pressure-dependent crystallisation temperatures of eHDA samples with LDA nuclei and bulk LDA allows the estimation of the Laplace pressure and the size of a LDA nucleus.

This expanded second edition of Relativity and the Nature of Spacetime c- tains several major changes and a number of additions to different ch- ters. Two chapters (Chaps. 6 and 7), which discussed two speci?c groups of arguments against the reality of spacetime, have been transformed into - pendices (A and B). Two new chapters (Chaps. 6 and 10) have been added. Chapter 6, entitled Why Is the Issue of the Nature of Spacetime So Imp- tant?, elaborates on what was Sect. 5. 6 of the ?rst edition, and addresses some recent work on the nature of spacetime – for example, the growing (or evolving) block universe model of the world, which has recently been - vived by several physicists as what appears to be the last remaining alter- tive to the Minkowski absolute four-dimensional world (after it had become an undeniable fact that three-dimensionalism, or presentism, contradicts the relativistic experimental evidence). Chapter 10, entitled Spacetime and the Nature of Quantum Objects and based on what used to be Sects. 6. 2 and 6. 3 in the ?rst edition, explores the implications of the issue of the nature of spacetime for quantum physics, in order to see whether it can provide some insight into the nature of quantum objects. Two new sections have been included, namely, Sect. 5. 6 entitled Re- tivization of Existence and Observers in General Relativity and Sect. 7. 6 - titled Probing the Anisotropic Velocity of Light by a Terrestrial Experiment.