I missed this when it came out, but it seems that a semi-schooled thinker from New Zealand, Peter Lynds, offered last year a new and fascinating solution to Zeno?s paradoxes and, more generally, upended basic concepts of time, space, and position.
Basically, the fellow ? or should I call him a bloke?, not sure about New Zealand slang ? argues that you cannot pinpoint a ?moment in time? with the precision necessary to construct Zeno?s Paradoxes, or many other later models of motion. You cannot precisely identify a position of a moving object, either, which I gather is similar to but a bolder version of older theories about the inability of human beings to simulate reality with mathematics and models.
Recall that Zeno?s paradoxes dealt with seemingly unsolvable contractions: Achilles could never catch up with a tortoise in a race because he would first have to reach the tortoise?s previous location, by which the latter would have moved, and so on into infinity. I always thought the solution was that Zeno had wrongly suggested distance could be divided into smaller bits into infinity without also suggesting that time could be divided infinitely. Lynds argues, I think, that neither can properly be thought of as divisible in a precise sense.
Before you scoff, remember that Albert Einstein was ?semi-schooled? and working at the Patent Office in Switzerland when he made his greatest discoveries.
