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The Indefatigable Punk Redux
For the benefit of Mike and those sexy diagrams of his, a repost from the Bulletproof Punk archives circa the 5th of September, 2001. I'm soooo ahead of my time
How ironic (or is that serendipitous), last night I complained that in secondary school I was never given the really cool problems to solve and on my trip home last night while reading Philip K Dick's short story compilation Beyond Lies the Wub I read the short story The Indefatigable Frog.
The story revolves around Zeno's Paradox, Zeno was a student of Parmenides and the paradox refutes the Pythagoreans' Division Principle (everything is divisible). If you are trying to go from point A to point B then, before you can get to point B, you must first go to point C (which is the midpoint between A and B, since that line can be divided). To get from A to C, you must first go to D, the midpoint between A and C. To go from A to D, you must first go to E, the midpoint... and so on and so forth. Eventually, you have an infinite number of points, and a finite amount of time to get from point A to point B. This is impossible. According to Zeno: Looking equates to Appearance, Thinking equates to Reality, and common people confuse them and never arrive anywhere.
In the story two professors try to prove or disprove the theory by using the frog in the well analogy. A frog jumps half the remaining distance out of a well with each jump, will the frog ever get out of the well? Mathematically no, philosophically yes.
I remember reading this story in my early teens and not understanding why nobody seemed to define what point of the frog needs to reach the edge of the well. If it is the center of gravity then eventually the distance from the frog's center of gravity to his front paw will be greater than the distance left to jump and he no longer needs to jump, he can just haul himself out. If the point of mesure is the furthest forward point of the frog though... well... remember all those distressed sheep on Iona? There are now a bunch of distressed frogs stuck just on the brink of wells somewhere to worry about too.
Zeno, convinced by his own conclusions, never moved again and recently appeared as Sloth in the movie Se7en.
Apr.28.2003