Todd Suomela's Library tagged paradox →  View Popular, Search in Google

"In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions:

The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful.
The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely it is to happen."

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in list: Philosophy Notes

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The sorites paradox is the name given to a class of paradoxical arguments, also known as little-by-little arguments, which arise as a result of the indeterminacy surrounding limits of application of the predicates involved. For example, the concept of a heap appears to lack sharp boundaries and, as a consequence of the subsequent indeterminacy surrounding the extension of the predicate ‘is a heap’, no one grain of wheat can be identified as making the difference between being a heap and not being a heap. Given then that one grain of wheat does not make a heap, it would seem to follow that two do not, thus three do not, and so on. In the end it would appear that no amount of wheat can make a heap. We are faced with paradox since from apparently true premises by seemingly uncontroversial reasoning we arrive at an apparently false conclusion.

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in list: Philosophy Notes

``No one has ever touched Zeno without refuting him''. We will not refute Zeno in this paper. Instead we review some unexpected encounters of Zeno with modern science. The paper begins with a brief biography of Zeno of Elea followed by his famous paradoxes of motion. Reflections on continuity of space and time lead us to Banach and Tarski and to their celebrated paradox, which is in fact not a paradox at all but a strict mathematical theorem, although very counterintuitive. Quantum mechanics brings another flavour in Zeno paradoxes. Quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects are really paradoxical but now experimental facts. Then we discuss supertasks and bifurcated supertasks. The concept of localization leads us to Newton and Wigner and to interesting phenomenon of quantum revivals. At last we note that the paradoxical idea of timeless universe, defended by Zeno and Parmenides at ancient times, is still alive in quantum gravity. The list of references that follows is necessarily incomplete but we hope it will assist interested reader to fill in details.

physics paradox people-zeno science philosophy motion