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discovered some of the mysteries of the very large and very small what we would call the infinite and the infinitesimal. |
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The young Zeno had a number of simple questions to ask the school of Pythagoras. The questions all dealt with infinite collections of very small things. How can an object be made of an infinite number of small parts, and still be finite in size? A specific form of the question dealt with the infinite number of parts making up any finite motion: If you walk one mile on the first day, and a half mile on the second day, a quarter mile on the third day, etc., how far will you have walked after walking for an infinite number of days? The answer is two miles, but Pythagoras had no way of beginning to solve this problem, or the others presented by Zeno. Pythagoras' followers solved the problem by having Zeno executed a few years later, for both his ideas and his politics. |
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The Greeks obviously took their philosophy seriously. Psychologist Dr. Charles Tart says that when an audience is presented with a theory that is one level above their understanding, they find it inspiring. When the information is two levels above their comprehension, they fall asleep. At three levels, they become angry; and when the data reaches four levels above the level of the audience, they want to kill the presenter. |
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This humorous observation from Dr. Tart confirms my experience of seeing highly intelligent scientists become enraged at the very mention of ESP. Then again, I've been there myself but I will only admit to falling asleep. |
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Albert Einstein In the 1800s, the greatest scientist of the time, Pierre-Simon Laplace, had said that the world is like a great machine: "Give me the initial conditions, and I can tell you what all the final states will be." At the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin and many other scientists believed, and said openly, that although there were some loose ends, all that remained for physics to accomplish was to calculate additional decimal places for the physical constants. At that time, so-called classical physics considered itself in a wonderful state: James Clerk Maxwell had created a unified theory for electromagnetic waves and visible light waves. Through |
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