Erwiderung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Structural hierarchy of rock masses and the mechanisms of its formation

The formation mechanisms for the structural hierarchy in geological media are discussed. It is shown that the formation of such a hierarchy is caused by certain external and internal circumstances. The first ones consist in the fact that, because of external actions, the Earth’s poles continuously execute the translational and rotational motions responsible for a regular structure of rock fracture and for the appearance of the scale factor √2. The second ones consist in the fact that, under the action of many random factors and because of external actions, during the formation of geological media there appear dissipative structures and, hence, some self-similar fractal structures are formed.     

Reply to Nathan: How to reconstruct the causal argument

Nicholas Nathan tries to resist the current version of the causal argument for sense-data in two ways. First he suggests that, on what he considers to be the correct re-construction of the argument, it equivocates on the sense of proximate cause. Second he defends a form of disjunctivism, by claiming that there might be an extra mechanism involved in producing veridical hallucination, that is not present in perception. I argue that Nathan’s reconstruction of the argument is not the appropriate one, and that, properly interpreted, the argument does not equivocate on proximate cause. Furthermore, I claim that his postulation of a modified mechanism for hallucinations is implausibly ad hoc.     

Effects of the copolymer microstructure on the morphology of polyethylene–poly(ethylene‐co‐α‐olefin) blends

The effects of the copolymer microstructure on the morphology evolution in polyethylene/poly(ethylene‐co‐α‐olefin) blends were investigated. Microscopy revealed that the melt‐phase morphology, inferred from the solid‐state morphologies of annealed and quenched samples, was strongly affected by the copolymer structure, that is, the branch content and branch length. Higher molecular weight α‐olefin comonomer residues and residue contents in the copolymers led to faster coarsening of the morphology. The molecular weight of the polyethylene and the copolymers affected the coarsening rates of the morphology, principally through its influence on the melt viscosity. The effects of the molecular weight were largely explained by the normalization of the coarsening rate data with respect to the thermal energy and zero‐shear‐rate viscosity. Thus, the effect of the molecular weight on the compatibility of the blends was much smaller than the effects of the branch length and branch number. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 42: 965–973, 2004