RascalPuff's Blog

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.

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 further notice, is furthermore indivisible.

That is, Zeno probly wouldn’t be able to hack and bisect the Planck length any further. (Although 'string theorists' might take issue, with the application of mathematics.)

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 rocket scientists. Anyone care to add or subtract anything to or from this?)