This paper examines the Kalam cosmological argument, as put forward by William Craig. Craig infers the existence of a personal God from the supposedly finite past of the universe. The temporal finiteness of the universe is based upon philosophical arguments for the presumed impossibility of an actual infinity of past events and is confirmed by two lines of scientific evidence. The arguments aga...

–This paper deals with a small mobile device, "Seal Mechanism," with three degrees of freedom (DOFs). An L-shaped structure of Seal Mechanism is proposed. This device consists of two controlled Electromagnets FA and FB connected by two Piezoelectric actuators EA and EB with Electromagnet FC that generates a constant friction. The friction at FA and FB are alternated by an on-off control. The wh...

Second order necessary and sufficient optimality conditions for bang–bang control problems have been studied in Milyutin, Osmolovskii (1998). These conditions amount to testing the positive (semi–)definiteness of a quadratic form on a critical cone. The assumptions are appropriate for numerical verification only in some special cases. In this paper, we study various transformations of the quadr...