Zeno's paradox

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The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

Zeno (or Xeno, whichever spelling you prefer) of Elea was a Greek philosopher who described many different paradoxes. One paradox involved Achilles and a tortoise. If the tortoise was ahead of Achilles, how could he possibly ever catch it if he always had to make up half the distance? Figure 25: Zeno's paradox with Achilles and the tortoise. When I first heard about this paradox, my initial reaction was that space must be quantized — there must be some minimum distance that we traverse, otherwise, per the paradox, we would never be able to get two objects in the physical world to meet. We’d always be stuck trying to make up half the distance.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

Plenio, “Highly efficient energy excitation transfer in light-harvesting complexes: the fundamental role of noise-assisted transport,” Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 131 (2009), 105106–21. 2 M. Mohseni, P. Rebentrost, S. Lloyd and A. Aspuru-Guzik, “Environment-assisted quantum walks in photosynthetic energy transfer,” Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 129: 17 (2008), 174106. 3 B. Misra and G. Sudarshan, “The Zeno paradox in quantum theory,” Journal of Mathematical Physics, vol. 18 (1977), p. 746: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.523304. 4 S. Lloyd, M. Mohseni, A. Shabani and H. Rabitz, “The quantum Goldilocks effect: on the convergence of timescales in quantum transport,” arXiv preprint, arXiv:1111.4982, 2011. 5 A.

Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson

A Pattern Language, Colonization of Mars, double helix, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, Live Aid, scientific worldview, Zeno's paradox

“David, hurry up and get dressed, it's almost time for school.” David looks up from a book. “What?” “Get dressed it's almost time. Tim, do you want cereal?” “No.” “Okay.” He puts Tim back on a chair in front of cereal. “This okay?” “No.” Shoveling it in. School time approaches and David begins his daily reenactment of Zeno's paradox, a false conundrum first proposed by Zeno, concerning Achilles and how the closer it came time to go to school the slower Achilles moved and the less he heard from the surrounding world, until he entered an entirely different space-time continuum interacting very weakly with this one. Wondering how Neutrino Boy can ever have become so absentminded, his father reads the coffee cups while grinding the beans for his little morning pitcher of Greek coffee.

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Eighth Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers by Kate L. Turabian

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, illegal immigration, information security, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Steven Pinker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two and twenty, W. E. B. Du Bois, yellow journalism, Zeno's paradox

Mathematics Dictionary. 5th ed. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992. 1. Schwartzman, Steven. The Words of Mathematics: An Etymological Dictionary of Mathematical Terms Used in English. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1994. 2. Darling, David J. The Universal Book of Mathematics: From Abracadabra to Zeno's Paradoxes. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004. 2. Ito, Kiyosi, ed. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. 2. Weisstein, Eric W. CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2003. 3. Pemberton, John E. How to Find Out in Mathematics: A Guide to Sources of Information. 2nd rev. ed.

Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson

company town, Exxon Valdez, Fermat's Last Theorem, gravity well, hiring and firing, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, lateral thinking, no-fly zone, Occam's razor, Turing test, Zeno's paradox

A guide was only as happy as her least happy client, and right now she was surrounded by a bunch of frost-flocked insect-eyed mute people, Ta Shu and Jack enjoying themselves, the rest really eager for this part to be over. And yet as it got higher it got steeper, and they had to go slower. It was as if they were trapped in Zeno's paradox, and halving the distance to the top in increments of time that remained the same. Burning and freezing; waiting for Val to screw in ice screws, or screw them out; looking or not looking at the blue gaping fissures in the ice underfoot, each one a potential deathtrap. Thus it was nearly three in the afternoon when they finally came under the Hansen Shoulder, where a narrow ramp of ice led them right under its exposed rock, up toward the polar plateau.