2010-09-23 » Paradoxes

At lunch today one of my coworkers said something that reminded me of one of Zeno’s paradoxes. Specifically the “dichotomy paradox”. Basically the thinking here is that it should not be possible to get to anywhere, because to get somewhere requires that you first get halfway there. Then, to get from the halfway point to the destination you must again go past the halfway point between this new location and the destination. Every time you make it halfway, you must still make it past the halfway point between your new location and the destination. Since each of these distances must be finite and there are an infinite number of them you must cross before getting to your destination, you can never get there. However, since people get places all the time, this is a paradox.

I’ve been busy with work lately and I haven’t had much time to think about what to blog about. And I’ve not been stuck in any elevators recently, so I don’t have any exciting stories to tell. So I decided I’d write a short post on paradoxes. I suppose that’s better than writing nothing at all.

Here’s a sampling of some other interesting paradoxes to check out if you’re not familiar with them:

• The birthday paradox — which counter-intuitively proves that if you have 57 people in a room there’s a 99% chance two of them have the same birthday.
• Opposite Day — which is obviously not.
• The Liar Paradox — this does not exist.
• The Ship of Theseus — which raises the metaphysical question of what piece of the boat determines its identity.
• The Friendship Paradox — which helps out Facebook.
• The Voting Paradox — which explains why democracy sometimes doesn’t work.

If you read through those and are looking for more, Wikipedia’s even got a whole page listing paradoxes.

That’s it for today. Hopefully reading all those links will keep you busy until next week. And hopefully next week I’ll come up with something even more exciting to write about.