Movement is an illusion?

TimeWizardCosmo

TimeWizardCosmo

Senior Member
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Movement is an illusion?

I remember back in highschool we had this really weird science teacher. I'm going to try and explain things the way he did, but I might screw it up. I'm a graphic designer, not a physicist :D

Say you have a line segment:
ab.gif


Now, everyone learns in geometry that a line segment has an infinite number of points within itself. Given this, imagine that you were standing at point A, and that you wanted to get to point B. To do this, you would have to traverse an infinite number of points.

Given the definition of the word infinite:

in?fi?nite
adj.
Having no boundaries or limits.
Immeasurably great or large; boundless: infinite patience; a discovery of infinite importance.
Mathematics.
Existing beyond or being greater than any arbitrarily large value.
Unlimited in spatial extent: a line of infinite length.
Of or relating to a set capable of being put into one-to-one correspondence with a proper subset of itself.
Click to expand...

It should be impossible to move from point A to point B because there are an unlimited number of points between the two. If there was a such thing as "infinity", you could never traverse all given points since they are, well... Infinite.

The only way you could possibly move from one point to another is if infinity did not exist.

*sigh* I really hope I explained this right....
 
Movement is an illusion?

Interesting explanation, however it relies on a mathematical description of a "point". In our daily lives we move from point A to point B all the time; our walk from our house to the coffee shop, from one point to another, is easily accomplished. Now, during our travel we do cross an infinite number of mathematical points, but remember the definition of a point in mathematics is that the point has no mass and is infinitely small, and thus does not exist in the real world.
 

Movement is an illusion?

But what if you defined two points as say, my computer chair, and the second point being the doorway to the kitchen?
 

Movement is an illusion?

If the points had a physical volume to them then they would necessarily be limited by that volume in proportion to the length of your line segment. If you have a series of points 1 metre in diameter, and a line segment 10 metres long, then you would only be able to fit ten points on the line segment.
 
Movement is an illusion?

What about the possibility that the teacher is correct mathematically and that the perspective needs to be out side the box as it were.

My point, there is only the illusion of movement and in fact we are already there and that the movement is just a physical illusion?

Would this satisfy both answers?
 
Movement is an illusion?

A distance can only be so small ( come to think of it, if there was no distance then nothing would exist) its just a bad explanation of how many "pieces to the pie there are", the smallest possible distance is like 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001(keep going till you get somewhere around the size of electrons or smaller) from nothingness, the points are not infinite, only so much can be squeezed into a space.

Alot of people ( mathematicians mostly) would probably disagree with me but everything is made from matter, matter needs to have a size and consistancy to be matter and has to occupy space, and space takes distance, so you can kind of say that space is distance in a way(if we were to talk about outer space, my sentence about matter would be destroyed in a matter of seconds as outer space is a vacume, but there is still space is a vacume so maybe dark matter does exist after all?!)
 

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