Wednesday, November 29, 2006

More Postcards




Another question from the "Why don't penguin feet freeze?" book. Goes something like this... A fly is flying in the opposite direction to a moving train. The fly hits the train head-on. As the fly strikes the front of the train, it's direction of movement changes 180 degrees and at the instand it changes direction, the fly must be stationary and since, at that instant, it is also stuck in front of th etrain, the train must also be stationary. Thus, a fly can stop a train.

There were 4 responses to this, the last one being of interest to me. Apparently there is this person, Zeno of Elea, who around 450BC said that a moving object is always in motion, and yet at any given time it is somewhere (that is, stationary). WE humans cannot see, measure, or imagine an infinitely small time any more than we can truly imagine infinity. We never will.

Got me thinking about your udon noodle zouping session. I think my mobile video camera can only capture 15fps. Your noodle went from there to not there in between frames and I couldn't find the one frame that had the noodle travelling up halfway towards your mouth.

So, each frame is like a frozen moment when everything stops. Therefore, going back to the train and the fly, neither stopped each other. One just went from being alive to being goo. The other just went from stop to stop.

Got it?

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