Headaches for epistemologists

Abstract

Consider someone who has achieved a high level of rational confidence about the meaning of life, and is in fact correct in their view. Like most people, they also have high rational confidences about a vast range of more mundane but still somewhat important truths -where their car keys are, what color their shirt is, whether it will rain tomorrow, etc. The devil gives them a choice: surrender their knowledge of the meaning of life, becoming fully uncertain about this topic forever, or instead give up a tiny bit of certainty about each of these mundane topics. Intuitively, they ought to choose the latter, no matter how many credences about mundane topics the choice involves. We get the same intuition if we replace the belief about the meaning of life with a belief about some other extremely important-seeming topic, such as the existence of God, core moral truths, and so forth. But what if the devil had given them a different choice: lose just a tiny bit of certainty about the meaning of life or lose everything

Gain Assisted Raman Induced Classical and Quantum Talbot Imaging

“…In the near‐field, Fresnel approximations are used, and wavefront curvature must be taken into consideration. [ 1,2 ] However, for far field is located outside of an aperture, and for this case wave fronts are considered to be parallel. The name for diffraction at a long distance is Fraunhofer diffraction and Young's double‐slit experiment provides evidence of far‐field diffraction.…”

“…Henry Fox Talbot, who invented photography in 1836, observed this phenomenon and it was afterward referred as the Talbot effect. [ 1 ] According to Lord Rayleigh's explanation the Talbot effect as a natural consequence of Fresnel diffraction. [ 3 ] The Talbot length is the distance at which self‐images of the periodic structure exchange as a result of constructive interference.…”