Richard Feynman -- physics genius

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.

                                                                  Richard Feynman 

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? and books written about him, such as Tuva or Bust! and Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.

Caltech Years

Feynman did significant work while at Caltech, including research in:

• Quantum electrodynamics. The theory for which Feynman won his Nobel Prize is known for its accurate predictions. This theory was begun in the earlier years during Feynman's work at Princeton as a graduate student and continued while he was at Cornell. This work consisted of two distinct formulations. The first is his path integral formulation, and the second is the formulation of Feynman diagrams. Both formulations contained his sum over histories method in which every possible path from one state to the next is considered, the final path being a sum over the possibilities (also referred to as sum-over-paths). For several years he lectured to students at Caltech on his path integral formulation of quantum theory. The second formulation of quantum electrodynamics (using Feynman diagrams) was specifically mentioned by the Nobel committee. The logical connection with the path integral formulation is interesting. Feynman did not prove that the rules for his diagrams followed mathematically from the path integral formulation. Some special cases were later proved by other people, but only in the real case, so the proofs do not work when spin is involved. The second formulation should be thought of as starting anew, but guided by the intuitive insight provided by the first formulation. Freeman Dyson published a paper in 1949, which added new rules to Feynman's that told how to implement renormalization. Students everywhere learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman had created. Eventually computer programs were written to compute Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a formal language with a grammar. Marc Kac provided the formal proofs of the summation under history, showing that the parabolic partial differential equation can be re-expressed as a sum under different histories (that is, an expectation operator), what is now known as the Feynman–Kac formula, the use of which extends beyond physics to many applications of stochastic processes.
• Physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a complete lack of viscosity when flowing. Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev D. Landau's theory of superfluidity. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped with the problem of superconductivity but the solution eluded Feynman. It was solved with the BCS theory of superconductivity, proposed by John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer.
• A model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial currents (an example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an anti-neutrino). Although E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal because the weak interaction was neatly described by the vector and axial currents. It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity violation.

He also developed Feynman diagrams, a bookkeeping device that helps in conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in spacetime, including the interactions between electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. This device allowed him, and later others, to approach time reversibility and other fundamental processes. Feynman's mental picture for these diagrams started with the hard sphere approximation, and the interactions could be thought of as collisions at first. It was not until decades later that physicists thought of analyzing the nodes of the Feynman diagrams more closely. Feynman painted Feynman diagrams on the exterior of his van.

From his diagrams of a small number of particles interacting in spacetime, Feynman could then model all of physics in terms of the spins of those particles and the range of coupling of the fundamental force.  Feynman attempted an explanation of the strong interactions governing nucleons scattering called the parton model. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by his Caltech colleague Murray Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". In the mid-1960s, physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers, not real particles, as the statistics of the Omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real. The Stanford linear accelerator deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed, analogously to Ernest Rutherford's experiment of scattering alpha particles on gold nuclei in 1911, that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles that scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way that did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically-neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically-neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons that carry the forces between the quarks and carry also the three-valued color quantum number that solves the Omega-minus problem. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was discovered in the decade after his death.

After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field, and derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more.  The computational device that Feynman discovered then for gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles" in the interior of his diagrams that have the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics, have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang-Mills theories, for example, QCD and the electro-weak theory.

Feynman was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1965. At this time in the early 1960s, Feynman exhausted himself by working on multiple major projects at the same time, including a request, while at Caltech, to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that eventually became The Feynman Lectures on Physics. He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Concerned over the connections to drugs and rock and roll that could be made from the image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. The Feynman Lectures on Physics occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though the books were not adopted by most universities as textbooks, they continue to sell well because they provide a deep understanding of physics. Many of his lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned into other books, including The Character of Physical Law, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Statistical Mechanics, Lectures on Gravitation, and the Feynman Lectures on Computation.

Feynman's students competed keenly for his attention; he was once awakened when a student solved a problem and dropped it in his mailbox; glimpsing the student sneaking across his lawn, he could not go back to sleep, and he read the student's solution. The next morning his breakfast was interrupted by another triumphant student, but Feynman informed him that he was too late.

Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology; one was claimed by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.  He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers.

In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of cargo cult science, which has the semblance of science, but is only pseudoscience due to a lack of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

Rapunzel and Love Child

A lonely couple, who want a child, live next to a walled garden belonging to an evil witch named Dame Gothel. The wife, experiencing the cravings associated with the arrival of her long-awaited pregnancy, notices a rapunzel plant (or, in most translated-to-English versions of the story, rampion), growing in the garden and longs for it, desperate to the point of death. One night, her husband breaks into the garden to get some for her. She makes a salad out of it and greedily eats it. It tastes so good that she longs for more. So her husband goes to get some for her a second time. As he scales the wall to return home, Dame Gothel catches him and accuses him of theft. He begs for mercy, and she agrees to be lenient, and allows him to take all he wants, on condition that the baby be given to her at birth. Desperate, he agrees. When the baby is born, Dame Gothel takes her to raise as her own and names her Rapunzel after the plant her mother craved. She grows up to be the most beautiful child in the world with long golden hair. When she reaches her twelfth year, Dame Gothel shuts her away in a tower in the middle of the woods, with neither stairs nor a door, and only one room and one window. When she visits her, she stands beneath the tower and calls out:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, so that I may climb your golden hair."

One day, a prince rides through the forest and hears Rapunzel singing from the tower. Entranced by her ethereal voice, he searches for her and discovers the tower, but is naturally unable to enter it. He returns often, listening to her beautiful singing, and one day sees Dame Gothel visit, and thus learns how to gain access to Rapunzel. When Dame Gothel leaves, he bids Rapunzel let her hair down. When she does so, he climbs up, makes her acquaintance, and eventually asks her to marry him. She agrees.

                                                        Rapunzel Tower and Prince by
                                                                     Johnny Gruelle

Together they plan a means of escape, wherein he will come each night (thus avoiding the Dame Gothel who visits her by day), and bring Rapunzel a piece of silk, which she will gradually weave into a ladder. Before the plan can come to fruition, however, she foolishly gives the prince away. In the first edition of edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, she innocently says that her dress is getting tight around her waist (indicating pregnancy); in the second edition, she asks Dame Gothel (in a moment of forgetfulness) why it is easier for her to draw up the prince than her.  In anger, she cuts off Rapunzel's hair and casts her out into the wilderness to fend for herself.

When the prince calls that night, Dame Gothel lets the severed hair down to haul him up. To his horror, he finds himself staring at her instead of Rapunzel, who is nowhere to be found. When she tells him in anger that he will never see Rapunzel again, he leaps from the tower in despair and is blinded by the thorns below. In another version, she pushes him and he falls on the thorns, thus becoming blind.

For months, he wanders through the wastelands of the country and eventually comes to the wilderness where Rapunzel now lives with the twins she has given birth to, a boy and a girl. One day, as she sings, he hears her voice again, and they are reunited. When they fall into each other's arms, her tears immediately restore his sight. He leads her and their children to his kingdom, where they live happily ever after.

In some versions of the story, Rapunzel's hair magically grows back after the prince touches it.

Another version of the story ends with the revelation that Dame Gothel had untied Rapunzel's hair after the prince leapt from the tower, and it slipped from her hands and landed far below, leaving her trapped in the tower.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Commentary

The seemingly uneven bargain with which "Rapunzel" opens is a common trope in fairy tales which is replicated in "Jack and the Beanstalk", Jack trades a cow for beans, and in "Beauty and the Beast", Belle comes to the Beast in return for a rose.  Folkloric beliefs often regarded it as quite dangerous to deny a pregnant woman any food she craved. Family members would often go to great lengths to secure such cravings.  Such desires for lettuce and like vegetables may indicate a need on her part for vitamins.  From a scientific interpretation the enchantress Dame Gothel is rather obviously a witch or medicine woman, who had mastered the use and production of a plant or drug capable of saving Rapunzel's mother from complications of pregnancy.  Ergotics, opioids, or cannabis can be considered candidates in the original Persian or subsequent versions of the tale, by analogy to the problem of Delphos' Oracle.

An influence on Grimm's Rapunzel was Petrosinella or Parsley, written by Giambattista Basile in his collection of fairy tales in 1634, Lo cunto de li cunti (The Story of Stories), or Pentamerone. This tells a similar tale of a pregnant woman desiring some parsley from the garden of an ogress, getting caught, and having to promise the ogress her baby. The encounters between the prince and the maiden in the tower are described in quite bawdy language. A similar story was published in France by Mademoiselle de la Force, called "Persinette". As Rapunzel did in the first edition of the Brothers Grimm, Persinette becomes pregnant during the course of the prince's visits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapunzel

Dogs Carry a Contagious Cancer

The Contagious Cancer

That Conquered the World

A contagious form of cancer that can spread between dogs during mating has highlighted the extent to which dogs accompanied human travellers throughout our seafaring history. But the tumours also provide surprising insights into how cancers evolve by ‘stealing’ DNA from their host.

Cambridge University, May 17, 2016 -- ‘Canine transmissible venereal tumour’ (CTVT) is a cancer that spreads between dogs through the transfer of living cancer cells, primarily during mating. The disease usually manifests as genital tumours in both male and female domestic dogs. The cancer first arose approximately 11,000 years ago from the cells of one individual dog; remarkably, it survived beyond the death of this original dog by spreading to new dogs. The cancer is now found in dog populations worldwide, and is the oldest and most prolific cancer lineage known in nature.

In a study published today in the journal eLife, an international team led by researchers at the University of Cambridge studied the DNA of mitochondria – the ‘batteries’ that provide cells with their energy – in 449 CTVT tumours from dogs in 39 countries across six continents. Previous research has shown that at occasional points in history, mitochondrial DNA has transferred from infected dogs to their tumours – and hence to tumour cells in subsequently-infected dogs.

In the new study, the researchers show that this process of swapping mitochondrial DNA has occurred at least five times since the original cancer arose. This discovery has allowed them to create an evolutionary ‘family tree’, showing how the tumours are related to each other. In addition, the unusual juxtaposition of different types of mitochondrial DNA within the same cell unexpectedly revealed that cancer cells can shuffle or ‘recombine’ DNA from different mitochondria.

“At five distinct time-points in its history, the cancer has ‘stolen’ mitochondrial DNA from its host, perhaps to help the tumour survive,” explains Andrea Strakova, from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, co-first author of the study. “This provides us with a set of unique genetic tags to trace how dogs have travelled the globe over the last few hundred years.”

In the evolutionary ‘family tree’, the five main branches are known as ‘clades’, each representing a point in history when mitochondria transferred between dog and tumour. By mapping tumours within these clades to the geographical location where they were found, the researchers were able to see how the cancers have spread across the globe. The distance and speed with which the clades have spread suggests that the dogs commonly travelled with human companions, often by sea.

One branch of the CTVT evolutionary tree appears to have spread from Russia or China around 1,000 years ago, but probably only came to the Americas within the last 500 years, suggesting that it was taken there by European colonialists. Conquistadors are known to have travelled with dogs – contemporary artworks have portrayed them both as attack dogs and as a source of food. 

The disease probably arrived in Australia around the turn of the twentieth century, most likely imported inadvertently by dogs accompanying European settlers.

One of the most surprising findings from the study related to how mitochondrial DNA transfers – and mixes – between the tumour and the host. The researchers found that mitochondrial DNA molecules from host cells that have migrated into tumour cells occasionally fuse with the tumour’s own  mitochondrial DNA, sharing host and tumour DNA in a process known as ‘recombination’. This is the first time this process has been observed in cancers.

Máire Ní Leathlobhair, the study’s co-first author, explains: “Mitochondrial DNA recombination could be happening on a much wider scale, including in human cancers, but it may usually be very difficult to detect. When recombination occurs in transmissible cancers, two potentially very different mitochondrial DNAs – one from the tumour, one from the host – are merging and so the result is more obvious. In human cancer, the tumour’s mitochondrial DNA is likely to be very similar to the mitochondrial DNA in the patient’s normal cells, so the result of recombination would be almost impossible to recognise.”

Although the significance of mitochondrial DNA recombination in cancer is not yet known, its discovery is now leading scientists to explore how this process may help cancer cells to survive – and if blocking it may stop cancer cells from growing.

Dr Elizabeth Murchison, senior author of the study, said: “The genetic changes in CTVT have allowed us to reconstruct the global journeys taken by this cancer over two thousand years. It is remarkable that this unusual and long-lived cancer can teach us so much about the history of dogs, and also about the genetic and evolutionary processes that underlie cancer more generally.”

The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society. - See more at: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/a-shaggy-dog-story-the-contagious-cancer-that-conquered-the-world#sthash.AfFmV01g.dpuf

The War of the Regulation

The War of the Regulation (or the Regulator Movement) was an uprising in the British North America's Carolina colonies, lasting from about 1765 to 1771, in which citizens took up arms against colonial officials. Though the rebellion did not change the power structure, some historians consider it a catalyst to the American Revolutionary War.

Causes

The origins of the War of Regulation stem from a dramatic population increase in North and South Carolina during the 1760s, following migration from the larger eastern cities to the rural west. The inland section of the colonies had once been predominantly composed of planters with an agricultural economy. Merchants and lawyers began to move west, upsetting the social and political structure. They were joined by new Scots-Irish immigrants, who populated the backcountry.

At the same time, the local inland agricultural community suffered from a deep economic depression, due to severe droughts throughout the previous decade. The loss of crops cost farmers not only their direct food source, but also their primary means of an income, which led many to rely on the goods being brought by newly arrived merchants. As income was cut off, the local planters often fell into debt. The merchants, in turn, relied on lawyers and the court to settle disputes. Debts were not uncommon at the time, but from 1755 to 1765, the cases brought to the docket increased nearly sixteen-fold, from seven annually to 111 in Orange County, North Carolina alone.

Such court cases could often lead to planters losing their homes and property, so they grew to resent the presence of the newcomers. The shift in population and politics eventually led to an imbalance within the colony's courthouses, where the newly arrived and well-educated lawyers used their superior knowledge of the law to their sometimes unjust advantage. A small clique of wealthy officials formed and became an exclusive inner circle in charge of the legal affairs of the area. The group was seen as a 'courthouse ring', or a small bunch of officials who grabbed most of the political power for themselves.

In 1764, several thousand people from North Carolina, mainly from Orange, Anson, and Granville counties in the western region, were extremely dissatisfied with the wealthy North Carolina officials, whom they considered cruel, arbitrary, tyrannical and corrupt. Local sheriffs collected taxes, as supported by the courts; the sheriffs and courts had sole control over their local regions. Many of the officers were very greedy and often would band together with other local officials for their own personal gain. The entire system depended on the integrity of local officials, many of whom engaged in extortion; taxes collected often enriched the tax collectors directly. At times, sheriffs would intentionally remove records of their tax collection in order to go back to residents to ask for more taxes. The system was endorsed by the colonial governor, who feared losing the support of the various county officials.

The effort to eliminate this system of government became known as the Regulator uprising, War of the Regulation, or the Regulator War. The most heavily affected areas were said to be those of Rowan, Anson, Orange, Granville, and Cumberland counties. It was a struggle between mostly lower-class citizens, who made up the majority of the backcountry population of North and South Carolina, and the wealthy planter elite, who comprised about 5% of the population, yet maintained almost total control of the government.

The stated primary aim of the Regulators was to form an honest government and reduce taxation. The wealthy businessmen/politicians who ruled North Carolina at this point saw this as a grave threat to their power. Ultimately, they brought in the militia to crush the rebellion and hanged its leaders. It is estimated that out of the 8,000 people living in Orange County at the time, some 6-7,000 supported the Regulators.

The War of the Regulation is considered a catalyst to the American Revolutionary War, and it was waged against corrupt officials representing king and crown. Intriguingly, many anti-Regulators eventually became Patriots during the American Revolution, such as William Hooper and Francis Nash; while many Regulators paradoxically became Loyalists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Regulation

15 Year Old Finds Mayan City

Canadian Teenager Finds Lost Mayan
City Using a Celestrial Theory
[blog] Posted on May 15, 2016 by Joseph P. Farrell

15 year old Canadian teenager William Gadoury has been instrumental and responsible for the discovery of a new and previously lost Mayan city in Meso-America, in this article that was seen and shared by so many regular readers here that I cannot possibly mention them all:

Teen's Stellar Theory Leads to Lost Mayan City

This short story can be cited almost in its entirety:

 (Newser)  – William Gadoury has spent a fifth of his life researching the ancient Maya, and the 15-year-old's effort has just paid off in a big way—with the apparent discovery of a lost city. "I did not understand why the Maya built their cities away from rivers, on marginal lands and in the mountains," the Quebec teen tells the Journal of Montreal. He did, however, know that the Mayans worshiped the stars, so William began comparing constellations to a land map and was "surprised and excited" to find that 117 Mayan cities were mapped out according to the stars, reports Yucatan Living. No one else had ever discovered such a correlation, according to Yucatan Expat Life. Then William noticed that only two Mayan cities lined up to a constellation of three stars, which he believed meant a lost city was hiding in the southern Yucatan Peninsula near Belize.

William informed the Canadian Space Agency, which provided satellite images of the area taken after a forest fire in 2005. They revealed the presence of a 282-foot-tall pyramid, plus 30 other structures. These can "hardly be attributed to natural phenomena," says Dr. Armand LaRocque, an expert in remote sensing at the University of New Brunswick. Based on the images, the city is believed to be one of the five largest in Mayan civilization. William has named it K'àak' Chi' or "Fire Mouth," but hasn't actually seen the site. (Emphasis added)

What I find incredibly interesting here is the scientific manner in which Mr. Gadoury proceeded: (1) he knew of the Mayan fascination with the stars (2) correlated stellar positions with the locations of known Mayan cities (3) noticed alignments of some of those cities with certain stars and constellations (4) noticed there was no known city where there should have been, and (5) predicted there should be a city there, and asked the Canadian Space Agency to look, and, voila. To my knowledge, this is one of the first such uses of the theory of celestial alignments to find a major city, though the theory of celestial alignments has been around for quite some time in the alternative community.

In other words, Mr. Gadoury gets not only the honor and distinction of provisionally naming the city which he predicted and discovered, but he has confirmed a wider theory about ancient cultures and celestial alignments, a theory championed by various alternative researchers, from Thomas Brophy's, Robert Bauval's, Graham Hancock's and other investigators of ancient Egypt, to those who've been invastigating Martian ruins, Moon ruins, and other terrestrial megaplithic sites, including Sir Normal Lockyear and other investigators.

What Mr. Gadoury has done is to provide yet another confirmation that celestial archeo-astronomy and astro-archeology is not a fringe theory of the alternative research community.

It's very real, and in Mr. Gadoury's case,capable of making predictions, and telling us "look here."

So where's the high octane speculation here?

I suggest that it is this: it is only a matter of time until this technique is applied to ancient texts. This is not to say it has not already been done; it has. But I suspect that there is much more lurking in them, and in known archeological sites, that we've only begun to explore. Not the least of these questions is why were the ancients so fascinated, and so determined, to build their sites and temples and cities incorporating such alignments? Of course, academic will answer with the usual "religious" motivations and "arguments from superstitution." But I suspect the reasons are much, much deeper than that, and perhaps very scientifically sophisticated.

http://gizadeathstar.com/2016/05/canadian-teenager-finds-lost-mayan-city-using-theory-celestial-alignments/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GizaDeathStar+%28Giza+Death+Star%29

Upheld: Specific Case Congressional Law

Bank Markazi v. Peterson, 578 U.S. ___ (2016), is a 2016 ruling by the United States Supreme Court that found that a law which only applied to a specific case, identified by docket number, and eliminated all of a party's defenses did not violate the separation of powers in the United States Constitution between the legislative (Congress) and judicial branches of government. The plaintiffs in the trial court, respondents in the Supreme Court, were several parties who had obtained judgments against Iran for its role in supporting state-sponsored terrorism, particularly the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings and 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, and sought execution against a bank account in New York held, through European intermediaries, on behalf of Bank Markazi, the state-owned central bank of Iran. The initial plaintiffs obtained court orders preventing the transfer of funds from the account in 2008 and initiated their lawsuit in 2010. Bank Markazi raised several defenses against the execution against the account, including that the account was not an asset of the bank, but rather an asset of its European intermediary, under both New York state property law and §201(a) of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. In response to concerns that existing laws were insufficient for the account to be used to settle the judgments, Congress included a section within a 2012 bill, codified after enactment as 22 U.S.C. § 8772, that identified the pending lawsuit by docket number, applied only to the assets in the identified case, and essentially abrogated every legal basis available to Bank Markazi's to prevent the plaintiffs from executing their claims against the account. Bank Markzi then argued that § 8772 was an unconstitutional breach of the separation of power between the legislative and judicial branches of government, because it effectively directed a particular result in a single case without changing the generally applicable law. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and, on appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit both upheld the constitutionality of § 8772 and cleared the way for the plaintiffs to execute their judgments against the account, which held about $1.75 billion in cash.

The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari and heard oral arguments in the case in January 2016, releasing their opinion in April 2016. A 6–2 majority found that § 8772 was not unconstitutional, because it "changed the law by establishing new substantive standards" —essentially, that if Iran owns the assets, they would be available for execution against judgments against Iran—for the district court to apply to the case.  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, explained that the federal judiciary has long upheld laws that affect one or a very small number of subjects as a valid exercise of Congress' legislative power and that the Supreme Court had previously upheld a statute that applied to cases identified by docket number in Robertson v. Seattle Audubon Society (1992).  The majority also upheld § 8772 as a valid exercise of Congress' authority over foreign affairs. Prior to the enactment of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) in 1976, Congress and the Executive branch had authority to determine the immunity of foreign states from lawsuits. Despite transferring the authority to determine immunity to the courts through the FSIA, the majority contended that "it remains Congress' prerogative to alter a foreign state's immunity."

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented and harshly criticized the majority's holding. After providing historical context for the separation of powers between the legislature and judiciary found in Article III of the United States Constitution, the Chief Justice explained that § 8772 is a type of unconstitutional breach of the separation "whereby Congress assumes the role of judge and decides a particular case in the first instance."  In his view, § 8772 is no different than a hypothetical law applying to a case Smith v. Jones in which the legislature says simply "Smith wins". In the Chief Justice's view, § 8772 was not a valid exercise of Congress' foreign affairs authority, contending that Congress and the Executive branch have sufficient authority that they do not need to "seize" the judiciary's power to "make a political decision look like a judicial one."  Quoting James Madison in Federalist No. 48, the Chief Justice lamented that this case "will indeed become a blueprint for extensive expansion of the legislative power at the judiciary's expense, feeding Congress's tendency to 'extend the sphere of its activity and draw all power into its impetuous vortex.'"

The decision came as Iran was seeking access to the world financial market just three months after many sanctions were lifted as a result of Iran's compliance with an agreement for curtailing development of its nuclear enrichment program. Various Iranian officials denounced the decision as "theft," "a ridicule of law and justice," and "open hostility by the United States against the Iranian people."  Iran announced that they would file suit against the United States in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for reparations if the U.S. courts begin to "plunder" assets from the Citibank account to give to the winning plaintiffs, although it is not clear if the ICJ would have jurisdiction to entertain the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Markazi_v._Peterson

Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF)

An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is an investment fund traded on stock exchanges, much like stocks. An ETF holds assets such as stocks, commodities, or bonds, and trades close to its net asset value over the course of the trading day. Most ETFs track an index, such as a stock index or bond index. ETFs may be attractive as investments because of their low costs, tax efficiency, and stock-like features.  By 2013, ETFs were the most popular type of exchange-traded product.

Only authorized participants, large broker-dealers who have entered into agreements with the ETF's distributor, actually buy or sell shares of an ETF directly from or to the ETF, and then only in creation units, which are large blocks of tens of thousands of ETF shares, usually exchanged in-kind with baskets of the underlying securities. Authorized participants may wish to invest in the ETF shares for the long-term, but they usually act as market makers on the open market, using their ability to exchange creation units with their underlying securities to provide liquidity of the ETF shares and help ensure that their intraday market price approximates the net asset value of the underlying assets. Other investors, such as individuals using a retail broker, trade ETF shares on this secondary market.

An ETF combines the valuation feature of a mutual fund or unit investment trust, which can be bought or sold at the end of each trading day for its net asset value, with the tradability feature of a closed-end fund, which trades throughout the trading day at prices that may be more or less than its net asset value. Closed-end funds are not considered to be ETFs, even though they are funds and are traded on an exchange. ETFs have been available in the US since 1993 and in Europe since 1999. ETFs traditionally have been index funds, but in 2008 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began to authorize the creation of actively managed ETFs.

ETFs offer both tax efficiency and lower transaction costs. More than two trillion dollars have been invested in ETFs since they were first introduced in the United States in 1993. By the end of 2015, ETFs offered "1,800 different products, covering almost every conceivable market sector, niche and trading strategy".

Leveraged ETFs

Leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs), or simply leveraged ETFs, are a special type of ETF that attempt to achieve returns that are more sensitive to market movements than non-leveraged ETFs. Leveraged index ETFs are often marketed as bull or bear funds. A leveraged bull ETF fund might for example attempt to achieve daily returns that are 2x or 3x more pronounced than the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500. A leveraged inverse (bear) ETF fund on the other hand may attempt to achieve returns that are -2x or -3x the daily index return, meaning that it will gain double or triple the loss of the market. Leveraged ETFs require the use of financial engineering techniques, including the use of equity swaps, derivatives and rebalancing, and re-indexing to achieve the desired return. The most common way to construct leveraged ETFs is by trading futures contracts.

The rebalancing and re-indexing of leveraged ETFs may have considerable costs when markets are volatile. The rebalancing problem is that the fund manager incurs trading losses because he needs to buy when the index goes up and sell when the index goes down in order to maintain a fixed leverage ratio. A 2.5% daily change in the index will for example reduce value of a -2x bear fund by about 0.18% per day, which means that about a third of the fund may be wasted in trading losses within a year (1-(1-0.18%)²⁵²=36.5%). Investors may however circumvent this problem by buying or writing futures directly, accepting a varying leverage ratio. A more reasonable estimate of daily market changes is 0.5%, which leads to a 2.6% yearly loss of principal in a 3x leveraged fund.

The re-indexing problem of leveraged ETFs stems from the arithmetic effect of volatility of the underlying index. Take, for example, an index that begins at 100 and a 2X fund based on that index that also starts at 100. In a first trading period (for example, a day), the index rises 10% to 110. The 2X fund will then rise 20% to 120. The index then drops back to 100 (a drop of 9.09%), so that it is now even. The drop in the 2X fund will be 18.18% (2*9.09). But 18.18% of 120 is 21.82. This puts the value of the 2X fund at 98.18. Even though the index is unchanged after two trading periods, an investor in the 2X fund would have lost 1.82%. This decline in value can be even greater for inverse funds (leveraged funds with negative multipliers such as -1, -2, or -3). It always occurs when the change in value of the underlying index changes direction. And the decay in value increases with volatility of the underlying index.

The effect of leverage is also reflected in the pricing of options written on leveraged ETFs. In particular, the terminal payoff of a leveraged ETF European/American put or call depends on the realized variance (hence the path) of the underlying index. The impact of leverage ratio can also be observed from the implied volatility surfaces of leveraged ETF options. For instance, the implied volatility curves of inverse leveraged ETFs (with negative multipliers such as -1, -2, or -3) are commonly observed to be increasing in strike, which is characteristically different from the implied volatility smiles or skews seen for index options or non-leveraged ETF options.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange-traded_fund