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Old 05-12-2011, 12:01 AM   #38 (permalink)
filtherton
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Quote:
Originally Posted by EventHorizon View Post
what if reality is a continuum instead of a quantum and things never actually end, they just get forever smaller and smaller and smaller, but then they never really begin either. i want to make reference to the story about how and arrow will never reach its target, but i dont know how. also, doesn't statistics say that nothing is impossible, it just hasn't happened yet? so maybe 1 = 1 might be true someday even though it hasn't happened yet.

everything is based of an assumption
I suspect you mean Zeno's Paradox with your allusion to the arrow. It is important to note that while mathematics is useful for representing reality in a surprisingly large number of ways, the fact that something is mathematically true doesn't necessarily make it actually true.

Statistics doesn't say that nothing is impossible. It's just a formalized method for dealing with uncertainty. Depending on how you've chosen to model a situation statistically, it does seem to imply that rare events will occur with a probability of 1 if given enough of an opportunity, but that doesn't mean that every conceiveable event qualifies as a rare event. Things still have to be possible to happen.
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