the only easy day was yesterday

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Zeno

We've all heard of Zeno's paradox. It's a sophism that plays on mathematics. Achilles is running to catch a tortoise, his path is describe by a straight line. Before he gets to the turtle he must travel half the distance to the turtle, and then from there he must travel half of that distance, ad infinitum. Aside from the obvious fact that we can catch up to things in the useful world in which we live, this problem, to the best of my knowledge remains unsolved. I propose that it can be solved through the study of science as the mind. The question arose when i was in calculus thismorning and the graph of the sine of pie divided by x yeilded an infinite oscilation between x=1 through -1. this presents the same problem, the function aproaches 0, but never gets to zero, it just keeps oscillating.

clearly to our useful lives we can touch and manipulate things. To this i am imagining that there is a discrepancy with how our minds operate; we have the capacity to observe, etc, but this capacity leads us awry; there is a reason that we see this paradox as being unsolvable, but it is clearly not useful. this is somewhat of a cartesian thing: it is not that our faculties of reason are wrong, but rather that they outstretch our other faculties of experiencing life, making it so that a thorough enogh concept of mathematics with over shoot what the actual concept of mathematics that we operate on is.

1 comment:

The W said...

I remember that there was a lot of stuff on Zeno's paradox in the 4th Dimension book.