• Hadriscus@jlai.lu
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    2 days ago

    wow ok. That’s the second poor taste comic I see posted by you in a minute. Do you specialize in reactionary humor ?

  • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I hated this “paradox” from the first time I encountered it sometime in grade school. I didn’t have the mathematical language for it at the time, but I distinctly remember arguing that as the number of intervals increases, the time to move one subdivision decreases, so there is no paradox at all. Basically, it doesn’t take much creativity to have a qualitative feeling for the concept of a convergent infinite series (which is what this is), but the teacher insisted it was a paradox, I couldn’t prove them wrong, and it frustrated the crap out of me.

    • drcobaltjedi@programming.dev
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      3 days ago

      Yeah same. An infinite converging series isn’t an impressive paradox, all he did was argue you could split an ever smaller fraction of space in half. After learning about it i spent a frustrating amount of time trying to fogure out “how is this a paradox?”

    • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      One of the definitions of paradox is a thing you know for sure is wrong, but can’t disprove it. Zeno knew Acchiles would reach the turtle in his paradox somehow, but without calculus (or algebra, for that matter) he couldn’t explain it

      • Miles O'Brien@startrek.website
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        3 days ago

        I would argue you can absolutely disprove it, empirically. By demonstrating. Just do the thing and go “wow it didn’t take forever!”

        • hobovision@mander.xyz
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          2 days ago

          Yes but the point was that it couldn’t be proved using the construction that he defined. You can prove it easily with a different construction, such as defining the hand moves 1 meter per second and the object is 1 meter away, therefore takes 1 second to reach. But they couldn’t yet deal with this alternate definition that still followed all the existing mathematical rules they had at the time. A finite distance could be divided in half, creating two smaller finite distances, but they had no concept of infinity or convergence, so they had no tools to deal with a recursive division.

  • Akasazh@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Time for the Feynman defense stain that even though it seems like objects touch, there’s no connection between the atoms of both objects (which is knife of why Zeno’s paradox is ultimately true)

  • turdas@suppo.fi
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    3 days ago

    Oh look, it’s the unfunny nu-boomer comic by renowned Israeli cartoonist Idan Schneider.