Can a paradox exist, although it seems illogical

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salad
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15 Jan 2013, 9:29 pm

for example, in a painting of a paradox a guy shifts in elevation and altitude, yet goes back to where he started:

does our brain make certain things that exist impossible to exist because we can't perceive such a thing? or is logic and perception 2 different aspects of the mind? is it possible to make things illogical possible?

redrobin62
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15 Jan 2013, 9:40 pm

MC Escher was a master in the art of the artistically impossible. When I was in college I "broke" his code. I found a way to create my own images where the fore and backgrounds were identical. I haven't drawn one in a while. Might be interesting to attempt if I remember the formula.

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ModusPonens
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15 Jan 2013, 11:42 pm

I don' know if this is what you're looking for, but there's a paradox (not a formal paradox, but a very, very counterintuitive result) called the Banach-Tarski paradox. Basicaly it says that you can divide a ball into a finite number of pieces and when you glue them together in a certain way you obtain two balls, each with the same volume as the first. Pretty cool huh?

ripped
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15 Jan 2013, 11:45 pm

I think a paradox is two statements which are true, yet each contradicts the other.
MC Escher was a master of optical illusion.

peterd
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16 Jan 2013, 3:27 am

All it takes is a couple of different contexts, and some symbols that appear in both with context dependent meanings. What's the big deal?

Declension
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16 Jan 2013, 4:09 am

ModusPonens wrote:

Basicaly it says that you can divide a ball into a finite number of pieces and when you glue them together in a certain way you obtain two balls, each with the same volume as the first. Pretty cool huh?

Mathematicians are just playing word games if they tell Joe Public that's what the Banach-Tarski result says. I'm especially dubious about the words "you can". The result says that there exists a certain thing, which can be interpreted as some sort of "method". Not the same thing as saying that "you can" do something.

Richard Feynman wrote:

They would explain to me, "You've got an orange, OK? Now you cut the orange into a finite number of pieces, put it back together, and it's as big as the sun. True or false?"

"No holes."

"Impossible!

"Ha! Everybody gather around! It's So-and-so's theorem of immeasurable measure!"

Just when they think they've got me, I remind them, "But you said an orange! You can't cut the orange peel any thinner than the atoms."

"But we have the condition of continuity: We can keep on cutting!"

"No, you said an orange, so I assumed that you meant a real orange."

ruveyn
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16 Jan 2013, 8:29 am

Let me restate the issue slightly. Can contradictions actually exist in the real physical world?

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Trencher93
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16 Jan 2013, 10:57 am

ruveyn wrote:

Can contradictions actually exist in the real physical world?

Sure! Look before you leap / he who hesitates is lost. You can't get a job without experience / you can't get experience without a job. The most creative people usually have the least output, while hacks crank out massive amounts of work. We're a walking mess of contradictions in the physical world. It's almost like to have an interesting world, contradictions have to be allowed.

BTW, an Escher drawing isn't really a paradox - it's a mistake in using perspective to draw something. An interesting one, but still a mistake.

ModusPonens
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16 Jan 2013, 12:50 pm

Declension wrote:

ModusPonens wrote:

Richard Feynman wrote:

I'm not a mathematician, so I don't (still) have a deep grasp of what a subject is about. I was just describing my intuition. But the idea is interesting enough to be transmited.

Nice quote from Feynman.

naturalplastic
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16 Jan 2013, 8:43 pm

Go to that tourist trap in Colorado (the upside down house- or the sideways house- something like that- forget what its called), and you will see three dimensional versions of what escher does.

It just tricks with perspective.

In the house they do things like have whacky rooms that exploit your expectation that any room is going to be rectangular with the same hight walls all the way round- and cause you to 'see' people get bigger as they walk away from you- and so forth.

ianorlin
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16 Jan 2013, 10:11 pm

Trencher93 wrote:

ruveyn wrote:

Can contradictions actually exist in the real physical world?

Although I view not being able to get job without experience as endogenity.

ripped
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16 Jan 2013, 10:47 pm

ruveyn wrote:

Can contradictions actually exist in the real physical world?

ruveyn

One one level the physical universe is considered a paradox.

By the first law of thermodynamics, energy is never created or lost, merely converted from one form into another.

If energy is never created, how did the universe get here?

Oh, it was created from nothing.

If it was created from nothing, then what was there to create it?

ModusPonens
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17 Jan 2013, 12:39 pm

It could have existed for an infinite amount of time.

ruveyn
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17 Jan 2013, 12:46 pm

ripped wrote:

Oh, it was created from nothing.

If it was created from nothing, then what was there to create it?

By definition or by hypothesis, nothing created it.

I prefer of version of a succession of big bank like events as suggested by Steinhardt and Turok.

Maybe it is Turtles all the way down.

ruveyn

ripped
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17 Jan 2013, 6:51 pm

ruveyn wrote:

ripped wrote:

Oh, it was created from nothing.

If it was created from nothing, then what was there to create it?

Maybe it is Turtles all the way down.

ruveyn

Turtles, yes. I would definitely go with the turtles.

salad
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17 Jan 2013, 7:40 pm

ripped wrote:

ruveyn wrote:

Can contradictions actually exist in the real physical world?

ruveyn

That's if you assume God doesn't exist. I use this to prove that God does exist.

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