Science as a Form of Life and Cross-disciplinarity: Mariano Artigas and Charles S. Peirce

According to Charles S. Peirce and to Mariano Artigas, science is the collective and cooperative activity of all those whose lives are animated by the desire to discover the truth. The particular sciences are branches of a common tree. The unity of science is not achieved by the reduction of the special sciences to more basic ones: the new name for the unity of the sciences is cross-disciplinarity. This is not a union of the sciences themselves, but rather the unity and dialogue of scientists, the real inquirers into the truth. In the light of Peirce’s and Artigas’s teachings, we can see that philosophers are in just the right place to call for this unity of sciences. This call should not be seen as promoting a return to the old scientism, but seeks a deep dialogue between the particular sciences and philosophy in order to deal with the presuppositions of the scientific enterprise. The key to the cross-disciplinarity of knowledge is not revolution, but rather shared efforts in a unique mixture of continuity and fallibilism, of affection and reason, of the attempt to understand others’ disciplines as well as our own

Philosophers, scientists and the unity of science

This paper examines historical images of the unity of science and makes a case for a contemporary conceptualisation of this project for our own times. It argues that, to overcome the fragmentation of knowledge, it is necessary to have an adequate and appropriate philosophy. This paper outlines the parameters of such a philosophy

Stability of Granular Tunnel

We demonstrated the stability of tunnels made of granular matters is strongly dependent on the grain size, tunnel diameter, and water content in the granules. Larger tunnel radius, larger grain size, and too much water content tend to destabilize the tunnel. We also develop a model to describe such findings. We identified a phase diagram of stability which greatly controlled by granular bond order. For granular bond order of larger than unity, we can always made a stable tunnel. However, for granular bond order of less than unity, we obtain a general expression for maximum tunnel thickness that can be made. To best of our knowledge, this is the first exploration regarding the granular tunnel stability.Comment: 13 pages, 6 Figures, and 1 Tabl

The Quest for Ethical Truth: Wang Yangming on the Unity of Knowing and Acting

Drawing an analogy between Wang Yangming’s endeavor to know ethical truth and Descartes’ quest for epistemic certainty, this paper proposes a reading of Wang\u27s doctrine of the unity of knowing and acting to the effect that the doctrine does not express an ethical teaching about how the knowledge that is already acquired is to be related to acting, but an epistemological claim as to how we know ethical truths. A detailed analysis of Wang’s relevant texts is offered to support the claim

Limit Theory for Moderate Deviations from a Unit Root under Weak Dependence

An asymptotic theory is given for autoregressive time series with weakly dependent innovations and a root of the form rho_{n} = 1+c/n^{alpha}, involving moderate deviations from unity when alpha in (0,1) and c in R are constant parameters. The limit theory combines a functional law to a diffusion on D[0,infinity) and a central limit theorem. For c > 0, the limit theory of the first order serial correlation coefficient is Cauchy and is invariant to both the distribution and the dependence structure of the innovations. To our knowledge, this is the first invariance principle of its kind for explosive processes. The rate of convergence is found to be n^{alpha}rho_{n}^{n}, which bridges asymptotic rate results for conventional local to unity cases (n) and explosive autoregressions ((1 + c)^{n}). For cCentral limit theory; Diffusion; Explosive autoregression, Local to unity; Moderate deviations, Unit root distribution, Weak dependence

Simple piezoelectric-actuated mirror with 180 kHz servo bandwidth

We present a high bandwidth piezoelectric-actuated mirror for length stabilization of an optical cavity. The actuator displays a transfer function with a flat amplitude response and greater than 135$^\circ$ phase margin up to 200 kHz, allowing a 180 kHz unity gain frequency to be achieved in a closed servo loop. To the best of our knowledge, this actuator has achieved the largest servo bandwidth for a piezoelectric transducer (PZT). The actuator should be very useful in a wide variety of applications requiring precision control of optical lengths, including laser frequency stabilization, optical interferometers, and optical communications