Try to get your head around this paradox!

by DanTheMan 21 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  thewiz

  i have come across this before, or something like it.

  as there is a maximum by which things can accelerate to, the speed of light (although i hear that is in question).

  there is also a minimum that things can freeze, nothing can reach absolute 0, because then there would be no molecular movement; thereby defeating the uncertainty principle and black body radiation and knowing a particle's EXACT location and energy at the SAME history in time. therefore being able to predict the ONE infinite sum over histories and ALWAYS knowing the outcome (something only God and AlanF can know/do)

  there is also minimum distance that traversed, anything "smaller" simply gets you to your target in the last half distance; in other words, there really isn't a last half distance, because that last half distance cannot exist. you simply get there.

  there is also a minimum time, which if i remember right is governed by Planck’s constant.
• 

  refiners fire

  Franc:
  

  New Agey Channellers would say that the woman "drew" that reality to herself and that it was prearranged that she must experience rape, just as it was preordained that her rapist must experience what it was like to rape her. Each person being a fragment of the Godmind which is experiencing 3 Dimensional physicality. Thus, by this reasoning, God needs to experience the terrible fear of being raped and the experience of being the rapist also. One channeller I was sat listening to used the example of a man who was driving along the road and a tree branch fell on his car and killed him. He drew death to himself.It was prearranged that he would be born, grow to 35 years of age and then experience what it felt like to be hit by a log of wood at 60 miles an hour. All the members are sat there nodding away agreeing, so I said, pointing out a logical extension of such thinking, "Well a child who is kidnapped and molested, and murdered, draws that experience to themself and made a prearranged heavenly agreement with its molestor". Well, you should have heard the uproar that followed. Most of the members were women see. Pandemonium. The channeller asked me to refrain from comment in future in the interests of tranquility.

  Why the Godmind would need to continually experience what it felt like to be murdered is beyond me. You would think that it would be perfectly obvious, after one experience, that it was not a desirable option.
• 

  cynicus

  I've never heard of this motion paradox.

  It is very old, and usually called Zeno's paradox of the Arrow. The guy who formulated this one (and some others) was an old Greek, named Zeno from Elea who lived in the 5th century BC. The solution lies in the fact that the assumption:
  

  The distance from the arrow to the target can be halved an infinite amount of times, and the arrow must take some, however small, amount of time to traverse each distance. So technically, it should never reach its target! Motion cannot be fully explained by current physical models.

  is false. In mathemathical terms: the sum of an infinite number of halves is not per definition equal to an infinite number. This was Zeno's assumption: if you add infinitely many numbers, then no matter what these numbers are, you must get infinity. Some say that in fact Zeno knew very well that his assumption was false, and he was formulating his paradoxes (there are about 40 of these) to show the absurdity of the ideas of an other old Greek named Pythagoras, who stated that space and time are made up of discrete parts. Btw, yet another well known old greek, Aristoteles, already solved Zeno's paradox so the anecdote about Einstein is sheer folklore.

  (c)
• 

  Scully

  Using a similar analogy, someone could jump off a tall building and never end up a street pizza.

  However, you wouldn't want to be the one testing that theory, now would you?

  Love, Scully
• 

  Elsewhere

  Here is the solution to that paradox:

  http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52507.html
• 

  DanTheMan

  Cynicus,

  I stand corrected! Sorry about the misinformation, I guess I didn't read my book carefully enough. I checked the book, and I mixed two different parts about paradoxes together when I made the statement about Einstein.

  But I still don't see how adding an infinite amount of numbers can give you a finite sum.

  Elsewhere,

  Thanks for the link.
• 

  Francois

  Refiners, Yep I've heard that kinda thing myself and I don't buy it either. I don't think God can have the direct experience of evil since evil must be created by a sentient being, since it has no pre-existence. And God could never create evil.

  I really enjoyed your story of being asked to keep mum. Don'tcha just love hoisting 'em on their own petards?

  francois
• 

  Ed

  But I still don't see how adding an infinite amount of numbers can give you a finite sum.

  It is finite because as the number of increments approaches infinity, the value of the increment approaches zero.
• 

  cynicus

  But I still don't see how adding an infinite amount of numbers can give you a finite sum.

  Well that shouldn't be too difficult. Let us examine a simple fraction: 1 / 9. You will agree that this number is a number that truly exists: if you cut a pizza in nine equal pieces we call such a slice 1 / 9 th part. Oddly, if we try to represent this fraction as a decimal fraction something 'strange' happens: (I know this is done differently in the English-speaking countries, but this is how I was taught to do it)

   9 / 1.0 \ 0.111 
   9
   ---
   10
   9
   ---
   10
   9
   ---
   1

  And the division is still not finished.... We see that if we try to actually divide 1 by 9 by doing a "tail division" (as it is literally called in Dutch) a very special number develops: a zero with a repeating series of 1 digits behind the fractional point. You can try it out for your self, but you will see that the series never ends, and every extra division by 9 will give you another 1 in the series. The fractional part consists of an infinite series of 1's.

  Now lets rewrite part of the number we saw above in a different form: if I asked you to rewrite the number 0.11111 (five ones) as a sum of fractions where each fraction's numerator is required to be one, you might come up with the following:

   1 1 1 1 1
   ---- + ----- + ------ + ------- + -------- = 0.11111
   10 100 1000 10000 100000

  What happens here is that the numerator is constant, that is 1, and that the denominator is a power of 10, and for each digit in the fraction increases to the next power of 10.

  If we go back to the original example of the fraction 1 / 9 I already you that the same number in decimal form has an infinite number of 1-decimals. So the number 0.111 ... (where the 1's repeat ad inifinitum) is equal to 1 / 9. When we rewrote 0.11111 (five ones) as a sum of fractions, I showed you how the series of 5 digits behind the fractional point can be seen as a sum of a series of fractions that have 1 for numerator and and increasing power of 10 for denominator. Combining the two shows that:

   1 1 1 1 1 1 1 
   ---- + ----- + ------ + ------- + -------- + ... + -------- = -
   10 100 1000 10000 100000 10^n 9

  The expression 10^n should be read as 10 to the power of the largest number you can think of, namely n. And if you have thought of that number just multiply it a few times more by 10 so that it gets even larger, which is in effect the same as doing a couple of more divisions in the division example.

  I hope the above is understandable enough to show how adding an infinite amount of numbers can still produce a finite sum.

  (c)
• 

  gitasatsangha

  This particular logic excersize, was, I think, one of the things that led Einstine to the Theory of General Relativity.

  Case in point: any measure of half the distance can not be based on any constant in time, because there isn't any. We measure time more or less in terms of motion, weather it is counting out 1-mississippi 2-mississippi, using clockwork, quartz pulses, sand in a glass or cesium decay. It is all relative. We have an ideal of what we would like to measure, but just as with distance, there is no universal constant by which to judge it.

  So the arrow is going to hit the target. The function of time is important to do conditions like drag, and trajectory. But both the target and the arrow (and the world they are in gravitational lock around) are in motion, so again there is no way to develop a contant which would lead to this paradox. It is only theoretical.