I recall when I was in the 6th form at school (aged 16 or s0) our computer science teacher Mr Ramjee saying that if you drop a stone it has to travel half way to the floor before it gets there, then it has to travel half that distance again, then half that, then half that, how does it ever hit the floor? I think he was trying to explain logic. Then he came out with the answer:
"An infinite number of steps can take place in a finite time"
And I immediately knew that this was incorrect. I didn't tell him of course, I was probably dreaming about taking Nancy to the prom (except that we don't really have girls called Nancy and we certainly don't have proms over here).
I knew instinctively that the stone was not some euclidean point and I knew that the stone never really did hit the ground. I knew that the wave functions of the electron shells in the stone came to some probabalistic agreement with the wave functions of the electron shells in the floor about roughly where in spacetime they would put their world lines. They'd do that governed by an amount of uncertainty. It's the uncertainty that gives us relief from the illogic of:
"An infinite number of steps can take place in a finite time"
And lets the world work. If you look closely the world isn't really here. There is no stone.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
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