The Simulation Hypothesis
by
Rizwan Virk
Published 31 Mar 2019
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
and
Jim Al-Khalili
Published 14 Oct 2014
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
Published 6 Jul 1999
“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
Published 14 Apr 2007
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
Published 6 Jul 1987
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.