RE: Actual Infinity in Reality?
March 2, 2018 at 6:59 pm
(This post was last modified: March 2, 2018 at 7:00 pm by RoadRunner79.)
(March 2, 2018 at 6:48 pm)polymath257 Wrote:(March 2, 2018 at 5:09 pm)RoadRunner79 Wrote: You may do things as fast or slow as you like. In Zeno's dichotomy paradox, and your X<Y<1 no matter how much time, you will never reach 1, you will always have another point to go through that is less than 1 (hence why the term infinity applies). This is not an assumption... this is the math function being described! The argument is not that it will take an extraordinary amount of time to complete!
Let me do it like this. Suppose you are attempting to go through the sequence .9, .99, .999, .9999, .99999, .... There are two scenarios..
In the first, you are at .9 after 1 second, at .99 after 2 seconds, .999 after 3 seconds, etc. I agree that at this rate you will never get through the sequence: it will take an infinite amount of time to do so.
In the second, though, you are at .9 after 1 second, .99 after 1.5 seconds, .999 after 1.75 seconds, .9999 after 1.875 seconds, etc. Each step takes half the time of the previous one. In this scenario, you *will* get through the sequence of 9's after 2 seconds. At the 2 second mark you are past every single one of them.
And yes, whenever you are at any of those points, you have more to go through.
And yes, when you get to t=2, you are past all of them.
And no, there isn't a last one you went through.
And yes, you went through all of them.
The point: you do, in fact, go through an infinite number of times in every finite duration.
Why does this not work when you do the same process that you used to show an infinity, and is also the one in Zeno’s paradox? You always go to something different and don’t address this in the dichotomy paradox.
Note for everyone else. You may notice, that the math in Zeno’s paradox will never reach it’s goal. If the math gives you trouble, you can see that this same process is being used to show that there is an infinite amount of numbers, that you cannot get to the destination, then you add another infinite, and can then reach the destination. In more ways than one... what is being claimed simply does not add up.
It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. - Alexander Vilenkin
If I am shown my error, I will be the first to throw my books into the fire. - Martin Luther
If I am shown my error, I will be the first to throw my books into the fire. - Martin Luther