Talk:Zeno's paradoxes

to do

 * Paul Hornschemeier's most recent graphic novel, The Three Paradoxes, contains a comic version of Zeno presenting his three paradoxes to his fellow philosophers.
 * Zadie Smith references Zeno's arrow paradox, and, more briefly, Zeno's Achilles and tortoise paradox, at the end of Chapter 17 in her novel White Teeth.
 * Brian Massumi shoots Zeno's "philosophical arrow" in the opening chapter of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.
 * Philip K. Dick's short science-fiction story "The Indefatigable Frog" concerns an experiment to determine whether a frog which continually leaps half the distance to the top of a well will ever be able to get out of the well.
 * Allama Iqbal's book The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam discusses the paradox in Lecture II The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience, and suggests that motion is not continuous but discrete.
 * Ursula K. Le Guin's character of Shevek in The Dispossessed discusses the arrow paradox in great amusement with his un-understanding classmates as a child.
 * add missing refs from Rucker section below
 * add refs deleted with this edit

herman weyl
"According to this, the length of the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle in discretized space is always equal to the length of one of the two sides, in contradiction to geometry." -this sentence seems problematic, because it relates space with a distinstive attribute (discretized) to geometry without an an attribute. i cannot propose a solution since the meaning of "discretized" is unbeknowst to me, but i can propose an initial direction of reseach that is try replacing "geometry" with " euclidian geometry" as a formal (linguistical) corrction and check the meaning and reltiobn between "discretionalized" and "euclidian".

also im missing from the article a simple worded paragraph that would tell that the zeno paradoxes result in an so to say impossibility of the event observed in reality because the question is framed to look at a time frame that by its definition excludes the event of achilles reaching the turtle or the arrow reaching its target.

also theres this italian guy, carlo rovelli who deserves mention as the author of some books proposing that the infinite division used in the zeno paradoxes actually is in contradiction with the physical nature of the world. its not that he talks about zeno, its that when his quantum physics theory becomes proven enough to be accepted as not just a theory but rather the actual dscription of reality (if and when that happens) it will remind us that zeno was wrong in his assumption about infinite divisibility and that can be taken as a simple cause of his paradoxes. (if i take correctly a paradox takes a seemingly correct line of arguments and points to a result with it that is obviously contradicting reality, saying either the line of thought is not as correct as we think and then lets find the mistake in it, or reality is not what it is belived and then lets find the mistake in the belief about it.)89.134.199.32 (talk) 15:04, 2 February 2020 (UTC).

Remove the distance vs. time graph in § Achilles and the Tortoise?
The image supposes that a tortoise can run 5 m/s. No source supports this speed, and neither Zeno nor Aristotle supposes this to be possible. The world record for tortoises is 0.28 m/s and the accompanying text, unlike the image caption, implies a speed of 0.2 m/s.

Is the image worth preserving? I propose to delete it. It adds nothing to the text. It merely illustrates what is obvious anyhow, that Achilles, running at 10 m/s, will overtake anything running more slowly including, for example, a squirrel running at 5 m/s. (Squirrels can go that fast, though they're not noted for sustained effort.)

In the French Wikipedia, the graph is associated with a section on the resolution of the paradox. This makes more sense, as the figure illustrates how each of the successive stages in the race takes less time and brings Achilles closer to the tortoise until the tortoise is overtaken. The exposition is immediately followed by a discussion of the associated convergent infinite series. In the English Wikipedia, the infinite-series discussion is in a different article, Infinity § Zeno: Achilles and the tortoise. The figure should be here, if anywhere, though the argument in this section supposes the tortoise's speed to be 0.1 m/s. Modifying the graph to suppose that the tortoise is going 0.1 or 0.2 m/s is impractical, since the line for the tortoise would be nearly horizontal.

Peter Brown (talk) 22:52, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

If Zeno can get you asking the wrong questions...
The resolution of the paradoxes comes from understanding that if someone can direct your attention to an irrelevant part of a system, while you think you are looking at the whole system, they can convince you of foolish things about the whole system. So if you look at shorter and shorter segments of time (of a runner's or a Hare's motion), because a questioner like Zeno led you down that path, you discover the "paradox" that your inquiry doesn't tell you anything accurate about the characteristics of the overall motion. Or as Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity's Rainbow, "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

So this "paradox" has nothing to do with infinities or calculus, and everything to do with attention, focus, and distraction.

I have not found a Runcible Source that has noticed this, so it is not suitable for the article yet. Gnuish (talk) 04:40, 11 October 2022 (UTC)


 * One risk of being a debunker or skeptic is that you might not be skeptical about your own skepticism. Your explanation is great until you unequivocally declare "nothing to do with infinities". I think the history of math will bear out that the notion of limits is a very old problem (not initially solved by Newton and Leibnitz when they formulated calculus) and Zeno was a key motivator by framing it as a paradox. But what do I know? I'm not a historian of science. Martindo (talk) 05:11, 11 October 2022 (UTC)