| "Xeno's Paradox": revisited -
01-15-2008, 10:23 PM
Zeno’s Paradox: Reprise. The premise for Zeno’s ancient paradox is that if and when a straight line - A - B - continues to be divided in half, you never get to the other end. You keep dividing yer spatial halves in half and you just don’t get to B from A, on accounta infinity... OK. Meanwhile, in the real world, you can arrive at B from A when you simply move from A to B. Departures from A and arrivals at B happen all the time. What Zeno’s Paradox omits, is time. Chronology. The guy is talking exclusively about flash-frozen space, without factoring in time - where it’s synonymous with motion... Moreover, there was no way for Zeno to know that he would eventually arrive not only at the atom of Democritus; but then encountering the electrons, neutrons and protons of Thompson, Chadwick and Rutherford, and finally, Max Planck’s photon, which, until pending notice, is furthermore indivisible. That is, Zeno probly wouldn’t be able to hack and bisect the Planck length any further. He will have arrived at B from A. There is a possibility that Zeno (‘Xeno’) deliberately cooked the books on his proffered ‘paradox’, just for the recreation of presenting what is in fact a resolvable riddle, though, it’s unlikely that in his own time, the riddle would unravel, not only with the included factor of time, but also the limitations of dividing Planck’s quantum (1900 AD vintaged) photon. (Ran into this in one of my old notebooks and thought to share it with other hacks or rocket scientists. Anyone care to add or subtract anything to or from this? <Michael?>) Best Regards, - RP (George Berkeley, 1710) ... lay the beginning in a distinct explication of what is meant by thing, reality, existence: for in vain shall we dispute concerning the real existence of things, or pretend to any knowledge thereof, so long as we have not fixed the meaning of those words. "All things come out of the one and the one out of all things." - Heraclitus "Reality is an illusion - albeit a persistent one." - Einstein "Particles give me a headache." - Ibid |