By Joseph Mazur
ISBN-10: 0452289173
ISBN-13: 9780452289178
The attention-grabbing tale of an historic riddle?and what it finds in regards to the nature of time and space
3 millennia in the past, the Greek thinker Zeno developed a sequence of logical paradoxes to end up that movement is very unlikely. this present day, those paradoxes stay at the leading edge of our investigations into the material of area and time. Zeno?s Paradox makes use of the movement paradox as a jumping-off aspect for an exploration of the twenty-five-hundred-year quest to discover the genuine nature of the universe. From Galileo to Einstein to Stephen Hawking, a number of the maximum minds in historical past have tackled the matter and made awesome breakthroughs?but via all of it, the ambiguity of movement continues to be.
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Extra info for Zeno’s Paradox: Unraveling the Ancient Mystery Behind the Science of Space and Time
Example text
A. , 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. ) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. ) • Penguin Books India Pvt. , Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published under the title The Motion Paradox in a Dutton edition. Copyright © Joseph Mazur, 2007 All rights reserved The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows: Mazur, Joseph.
Yet time is divided by this curious thing we know as “now”; and, by the same reasoning, so is space. The position of any object in motion is marked and divided by its “now” place in space. But that does not exclude the concept of a smallest unit of time or space. Aristotle surely understood that an interval could be infinitely divided, but his conception of infinity grants that we can always imagine a “beyond”—a potential for continuing indefinitely; that our minds have the power to continue to divide a line or an interval of time as often as we like.
Pythagoras of Samos, who lived from about 560 to 480 BCE, was probably the most famous and charismatic mathematician of the time. We know very little about him, but that he traveled widely in the Greek world and settled in Crotona on the southeastern end of the Italian peninsula. His mathematics had a mystical aspect that drew a group of devoted students, a sect of disciples, a brotherhood that lasted for a century after his death. The Pythagoreans influenced many, including Zeno. In particular, the notion that lines were made from strings of points like threads of miniscule beads beguiled him.