Zenophilia

"Never confuse motion with action."

~ Benjamin Franklin

 

 

 

 

Zeno of Elea anticipated many of the points I've touched upon over the preceding few posts in formulating what Bertrand Russell described as "immeasurably subtle and profound" paradoxes. Zeno was a Parmenidean philosopher, who shared Parmenides' belief that "All is One;" his paradoxes challenge the notions of Time and Space and the existence of entitites within them.

 

His 'Paradox of Place,' for example, is both a Platonic Form of the self-reference paradox and, paradoxically enough, a refutation of the Platonic Theory of Forms:

 

"If everything has a place, then place itself has a place, and so on ad infinitum."

 

He similarly challenges Time in the Fletcher's Paradox:

 

"If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless."

 

In fact, elsewhere in his writings, Zeno demonstrates that not only is it impossible to move, it is impossible to start a journey or to reach a destination. Yet it is even more clearly demonstrable that motion occurs and that physical entities undergo motion travelling from place to place.

 

Intriguingly, advances in quantum physics suggest that apparent motion - and even more importantly, apparent lack of motion - are both not as straightforward as they seem. A famous experimental result, Young's Double-Slit Experiment, proves that light operates as a wave; Einstein's Nobel-Prizewinning verification of the photoelectric effect proves that it operates as a particle. The fundamentally paradoxical notion of wave-particle duality, which follows from these two results and leads to a bizarre conception of matter as a measure of quantum interference patterns and mass as a byproduct of collisions with Higgs bosons - all of this is just another paradigmatic way of representing the Parasimplicity Principle.