This chapter focuses on the electoral performance of social democratic parties in different institutional and competitive contexts. We explore three avenues to shed light on the relationship between social democratic parties’ strategic interaction with competitors and their respective electoral payoffs. We start from premises of spatial theories of party competition but hypothesize only behavioral relations between party choices and electoral outcomes, not strategic equilibrium configurations. We ask three questions: first, holding all other parties’ positions constant, do party positions closer to the center of a policy dimension – where empirically most voters are located – pay off in electoral terms and does this effect vary across relevant dimension of party competition? Second, does distance of parties from competitors improve their electoral fortunes? Taking spatial considerations of the first two questions together, are parties electorally better off if they place themselves closer to the center of policy spaces, while simultaneously facing only distant competitors? Third, what are the electoral consequences of two focal parties – a moderate left (social democratic) and a moderate right (conservative or Christian Democratic or People’s) party – simultaneously choosing positions in a multiparty field? These consequences may be different for the individual parties and for their ideological “field.” The performance of individual parties turns out to be much in line with spatial theory: When Social Democrats move to the center, they are likely to win voters from the center-right, but lose votes to green-left and radical-left parties within the left field. Social Democrats often perform stronger when they move left than to the center. But there is a crucial difference between their choices when it comes to considering the electoral performance of the entire set of left-field parties. By moving to the center, and shedding votes to their leftist competitors, Social Democrats sometimes effectively increase the size of the leftist field and thereby also boost their own bargaining power over coalition governments, as they are usually the most moderate party in the left field and most capable of crafting coalitions with parties of the center-right, particularly if Social Democrats control the median voter.

Neutrinos are the most difficult particle to study, because they interact only via weak interactions. However, they have given revolutionary surprises, and it is with neutrinos that physics beyond the SM has been discovered. In the SM, neutrino masses are rigorously zero, but experiments show that they do have a mass. In the SM, neutrino flavour eigenstates are mass eigenstates; experiments show that they are mixtures of them. Two discoveries proved this. One is neutrino oscillations, discovered in atmospheric neutrinos, the other is the adiabatic flavour conversion in matter, discovered in solar neutrinos.

These were with natural neutrinos. Several experiments have been, and are being, performed with artificial neutrinos from reactors or accelerators to measure with increasing accuracy the neutrino mixing matrix and the mass spectrum. We found that the neutrino mixing is much larger than that of the quarks. Nobody knows why.

The SM assumes neutrinos to be different from antineutrinos, but no experimental proof of it exists. Neutrinos and antineutrinos may well be the same particle, a Majorana spinor. We see how this is searched for by looking for the extremely rare double beta decay.

To what extent does moderation in ideological positioning by social democratic parties affect their short- and long-term electoral fortunes? Do existing social democratic electorates respond differently to moderation from the major parties of the Moderate Left on the economic as opposed to the cultural dimension? Previous research suggests that social democratic parties received an influx of centrist voters post-moderation but that these new centrist voters were less attached to the party and left in later elections, as did left-leaning social democrats frustrated by moderation strategies. This chapter further probes whether there is a link between moderation and individual voters’ shifts from social democratic parties at a later point, by considering a larger number of cases and by differentiating between the economic and cultural dimensions. We examine individual-level data on voting behavior combined with information on mainstream left parties’ ideological shifts in up to fifty elections in sixteen countries over recent decades. The findings show that (a) moderation can have detrimental consequences in the longer term; (b) the consequences of moderation differ across the left-right and cultural dimensions of electoral competition; and (c) the combination of individual-level analysis, with broader contextual and systemic considerations, is essential to fully engage with these questions.

The weak interaction was proposed by Fermi in 1933, to interpret the beta decay. The interaction Lagrangian is the product of two charged currents (CC) – one of the nucleons, one of the leptons. It was later discovered that parity and charge conjugation are not conserved and that the structure of the charged currents is a combination of vector and axial currents, V–A. The beautiful Goldhaber experiment on the helicity of the neutrino.

The coupling of all leptons is universal, but not that of the quarks. To obtain universality, Cabibbo introduced the concept of mixing of the hadronic currents, namely of quarks. Then the Glashow–Iliopoulos–Maiani mechanism solved a problem introducing the hypothesis that a fourth quark would exist, the charm, completing a doublet with the strange one. With the discovery of two more quarks, the quark mixing matrix contains a phase factor that is the origin of CP violation in the Standard Model.

The weak neutral currents were discovered with the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN in 1973. This showed a close similarity between weak and electromagnetic interactions and opened the way to their unification.

Just 20 years ago, molecular biologists Leonie Ringrose and Renato Paro published an article provocatively entitled ‘Remembering Silence’. The article focused on how modified epigenetic elements could subsequently return to their silent state (i.e. their epigenetic status before experimental or environmentally induced modulation). Ringrose and Paro raised a question of considerable importance to expanding research in human neuroepigenetics, that of reversibility. For neuroepigeneticists interested in the molecular impact of environments on individuals’ biological profiles, including epigenetic modifications thought to be mediators between life trauma and risk of psychopathology, this question could be translated as: if you experience a traumatic event and thus acquire an epigenetic state considered pathological, can you free yourself of that state? In this chapter, we examine researchers’ ambitions to account for the indeterminacy of life and the speculative possibility of reversing acquired epigenetic states. Bringing together the perspectives of medical anthropology and molecular biology, we explore how reversibility – a return to silence – is envisioned, how therapeutic interventions purported to bring about that silence might function, and what this might mean for the mental health of people who live in the aftermath of trauma.

Whereas most of the cases analyzed in this book pertain to concept formation in relatively well-bounded constellations of activity systems, the case of Housing First 2.0 discussed in this chapter represents concept formation in a broad field of activities aimed at the eradication of homelessness, located at multiple levels from national policy and government strategy down to counties, cities, and housing units working with individual clients. As such, the concept formation process is also lengthy and far from linear. The chapter traces a process of practical experimentation and supportive research that led to the emerging germ cell concept of Housing First 2.0. It is still too early to say to what extent and in what timeframe the new concept may stabilize, generalize, and actually transform homelessness work nationwide. In other words, ascending to the new expanded concrete has only begun. The ascending to the concrete needs to be followed and supported over the long haul.

Knowledge of the molecular and physiological mechanisms of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) is no longer confined to the lab. Rather, DOHaD is part of a scattered landscape of policy initiatives, including political discourses, programmatic statements, and public health measures. This chapter examines what could be called the ‘moral paradox’ of DOHaD in policymaking; that is, the idea that while the scope, foundations, and practical implications of DOHaD research call for structural interventions addressing social determinants of health over the lifecourse, messages can boil down to simplistic claims of individual responsibility addressed to parents and gestating bodies. The chapter draws from a systematic literature review to document claims towards individual responsibilities in DOHaD publications. It shows that scientists rarely make any straightforward argument in favour of individual responsibilities for health. The ‘moral paradox’ of DOHaD arises from an ambiguous stance on the pragmatic possibilities of health promotion strategies inspired by DOHaD knowledge, which mixes up the current practical possibilities of the field with its policy framing, opportunities, and political ambitions. The chapter concludes that a greater awareness of these moral idiosyncrasies in DOHaD research may help the field embrace a social justice framing.

Two widespread narratives attempt to account for the decline of social democratic parties over the past decades. The economic narrative points to these parties’ centrist positioning as the key cause and the Radical Left and Right as the key beneficiaries. By contrast, the cultural narrative focuses on the liberal positions of social democratic parties on new issues relating to cultural issues such as immigration, gender equality, and European integration and points to the Radical Right as key beneficiaries. What links these two narratives is the idea that Social Democrats have alienated the working class. In this chapter, we use individual-level survey data from eight countries to show that although social democratic parties have seen losses among all electoral groups, the voters who left social democratic parties were disproportionately centrist and educated. Second, we find that only a small share of former social democratic voters defected directly to parties of the Radical Right. Instead, social democratic parties lost most voters to moderate right, green, and left-libertarian parties. We additionally show that cultural attitudes play only a small role for choosing between moderate right and social democratic parties. By contrast, they are strongly linked to choices between social democratic and green/left-libertarian parties. These findings cast doubt on both predominant narratives of social democratic decline.

DOHaD research on preconception, prenatal, and early-life periods of human development can provide a critical resource for legal thinkers interrogating the lines of responsibility for environmental harms (both physical and psychosocial) that affect a child’s growth and development. DOHaD scholars who engage with epigenetic research offer an evidentiary narrative that traces the causal origin of early-life health harms to events that have occurred during pregnancy and prior to conception. Scientific research is increasingly providing evidence that those who suffer disadvantage throughout their lifecourse (in conditions of systemic oppression such as from racism, sexism, or poverty) may be disproportionately subject to molecular changes, creating harmed subgroups that are then intergenerationally reproduced as socially disadvantaged communities. Drawing examples from Australia, the United States, and Canada, this chapter asks what legal obligations, if any, should or can be imposed on contemporary society to ensure not just the future ’health’ of existing children (as they grow into adults) but also the generations of people yet to be born. It is argued that traditional common law legal responses that place responsibility on the individual rather than the community do not ensure intergenerational justice.

The DOHaD field provides critical evidence for investment in early life, linking environmental exposures during preconception, pregnancy, and infancy with later non-communicable disease risk. Despite the potential of this evidence to positively impact some of our most vulnerable communities, instances where communities are engaged in participatory DOHaD research and knowledge translation processes are limited. This chapter explores the benefits of community-based participatory research approaches and outlines current examples within the DOHaD field. In particular, it focuses on ongoing work within the Cook Islands where DOHaD has informed community-partnered research, scientific and health literacy programmes in schools, and the development of early-life nutrition resources for mothers and families.

This chapter argues against the narrative that posits a pre-twentieth century past, where the mother and fetus were one, in contrast with the present, where the fetus is visible and autonomous. I complicate this narrative by showing that the maternal–fetal relationship was redrawn and reinterpreted multiple times in the twentieth century. The ‘fetal parasite’ era was informed by the hereditarianism of the early 1900s. The notion of a developing organism sensitive to external influences was replaced by a remarkably sheltered fetus. In contrast, concerns around the physical and psychological trauma following the Second World War supported the notion of ‘critical’ periods, responsive to external influences mediated by the mother. Yet soon thereafter, the language and imagery of an autonomous, self-sufficient fetus became prevalent amidst political battles over abortion. The notion of the autonomous fetus is linked to evolutionary biology’s 1970s concepts of the ‘selfish gene’ – with the ‘selfish’ fetus pitted against the mother in the struggle over scarce resources. By the 1990s, the rise of DOHaD and epigenetics signalled a return of the maternally mediated environment to the science of human development. While some interpreted this as a return to the pre-modern model, there is a significant difference. Here maternal experiences and surroundings have to be rendered accessible to an experimental, molecular approach and to show evidence of a quantifiable change in observed parameters.

If the mass of a hadron is large enough, decays into final states that can be reached by strong interaction, that is, without violating any selection rule, are possible. The lifetime is then extremely short, of the order of a yoctosecond (10−24 s). These hadrons decay practically where they were born. We show how they are observed as ‘resonances’.

Hadrons, both baryons and mesons, were discovered in rapidly increasing numbers in the 1950s and early 1960s. How their quantum numbers, spin, parity and isospin were measured. Gradually it became clear that hadrons with the same spin and parity could be grouped in multiplets of the SU(3) symmetry. Proposal of the quark model and experimental verifications of its predictions. With increasing accelerator energies, more surprises were to come. The quarks are not only the three originally known, u, d and s, but three more exist, c, b and t. And more leptons were found, in total three ‘families’ of fundamental fermions, each with two quarks, a charged lepton and its neutrino.

The relationship between social democratic parties and labor unions is of interest for the entire era of labor mobilization since the nineteenth century. The middle-class shift in the employment structure of West European countries, the emergence of second-dimension politics, and the pluralization and fragmentation of the “left field” raise several questions in this regard: Have the constituencies of left parties and trade unions developed in parallel or they diverged? Consequently, do the average preferences of trade union members and left voters align or diverge? Do unionized left voters sort increasingly into radical left, social democratic or green and left-libertarian parties?

In this chapter, we address the subject of union–party relations and how it relates to social democratic fortunes with microlevel data on membership, political preference profiles, and electoral behavior. We find that the bond between labor unionists and social democrats is anchored in a rather close similarity and convergence of policy preferences. This proximity of beliefs is not limited to questions of economic redistribution but also covers policy issues concerning societal governance and immigration. In many instances, unionists are – on average – more libertarian on questions pertaining to the dimension of societal governance and more inclusive and universalistic on questions of citizenship than nonunionized social democratic voters. In consequence, unionists are progressively less an uncontested electoral preserve of Social Democracy.

In modern physics, symmetries are a powerful tool to constrain the form of equations, namely the Lagrangian that describes the system. Equations are assumed to be invariant under the transformation of a given group, which may be discrete or a continuous Lie group. Classification of the various types of symmetry. The concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking. It will evolve into the Higgs mechanism, which gives origin to the masses of the vector bosons that mediate the weak interactions, of the quarks and of the charged leptons.

The discrete symmetries, in particular the parity and the particle–antiparticle conjugation operations and the corresponding quantum numbers.

An important dynamical symmetry of the hadrons, the invariance of the Lagrangian under rigid rotations in an ‘internal’ space, the isospin space. The unitary group is SU(2).

A focus on the nutrition of women before and during pregnancy was important in establishing the field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). Maternal nutrition provided a means by which poor living conditions could be embodied and affect the development of the unborn baby. Historical evidence linking women’s nutrition to the size of the baby at birth was limited, but a plethora of research with laboratory animals ensued, with maternal diets manipulated to determine consequences for the offspring. This was necessary for the scientific acceptance of the theory. However, a narrow view of nutrition and its role in the first 1,000 days has held prominence, with pregnant women provided nutritional advice, behavioural interventions, and marketed products. This obscures the broad scope and implications of the DOHaD theory for health inequalities. We take a feminist science and technology studies (STS) approach to show how hegemonic nutrition and biopolitics pervade DOHaD research and pregnancy care in ways that render invisible the gendered dimensions of precarity, mothering, and food. We argue that both the scientific method and socio-political influences have constrained responses to DOHaD as an issue of social and reproductive justice.