Zeno - The Achilles Paradox
Sometimes have the feeling that no matter how hard you work, you can never catch up with the pile of work on your desk, because everytime you have worked through the existing pile, new work will have been added?
Welcome to the Achilles Paradox! Or not?
This paradox was formulated by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno, and states that the faster runner can never catch a slower runner because he is forever arriving at a point the slower runner has just vacated. Zeno described a race between the mythical athlete Achilles and a tortoise. The two start moving at the same moment, but if the tortoise is initially given a head start and continues to move ahead, Achilles can run at any speed and will never catch up with it. Zeno’s argument rests on the presumption that Achilles must first reach the point where the tortoise started, by which time the tortoise will have moved ahead, even if but a small distance, to another point; by time Achilles traverses the distance to his latter point, the tortoise will have moved ahead to another, and so on, and so forth. Read more...