Monday, May 14, 2007

Zeno's Paradox and a Continuous Solution

Now here is a statement of Zeno's Paradox, and I'm going to extend it even farther, because the original statement doesn't take everything into account. If a ball moves half of the distance to a tree. And then half of the rest of the distance, and half of the rest of the distance, and half of the rest of the distance, and so on, it never reaches the tree.

Okay, now think of this. The ball has to move half of half of the distance, and half of that, and half of that, and half of that, and so on, so not only can't the ball move all the way to the tree, it can't move at all.

Now, the reason this doesn't happen is because movement is continuous. The ball doesn't move a discrete distance, it moves continuosly. Physically this causes some other interesting sidelights about movement, but that is my solution. We are measuring a discrete distance, but the distance isn't discrete, it's continuous.

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