Friday, August 27, 2010
So Peter called me up last night, primarily to whine about his Calculus class. Between all the complaints and sobbing, I was able to retrieve one interesting piece of information; Calculus is the study of motion.
This got me to thinking. People like to say that you can only be in one place at a time. I would argue that it is actually impossible to only be in one place at a time. Think about it, if you are one place one moment, and someplace else the next (while you are walking for example), where were you in the moment between? Obviously (depending on acceleration) you were smack dab in between your two points. Here's where it gets tricky. At what point are you ever really in just one place? If time can be divided into an infinite number of smaller pieces, then linear space (in the case of walking) would also have to be addressed proportionately. That would all be true if we lived in this theoretical vacuum of a world, but fortunately for us there are Natural Laws that state that time is constantly moving forward. While you're trying to divide time into an infinite number of small pieces, time has passed by, theryby decreasing the amount of time by a measurable factor (making it less than infinity). So now we are able to plug a constant fraction into the "time" portion of our equation, leaving the number of spacial positions our body has been in at infinity. The logical outcome of this process proves that our bodies are always in motion. At a measurable moment (we'll call it x) our body is in two distinct places (-a- and -b-) at the same time. Of course this explains why pictures look all fuzzy when someone is running. It really gets interesting when you start looking at fighter planes and bullwhips, but we'll talk about that at a later point.
