Re: zeno paradox.

On Nov 21, 6:07 pm, Rotwang <sg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If you want to be confused by attempts to reason about the infinite as
applied to everyday notions of how the universe works, here is a
puzzle you might enjoy: Hilbert's Hotel has a countable infinity of
rooms numbered 0,1,2, and so on. If the hotel is full and another
guest arrives, each customer moves to the room with a number 1 higher
than that the room they are already in, and the new guest enters room
0. One night when the hotel is full a countably infinite number of new
guests arrives, the first at 11pm, the second at 11:30, the third at
11:45 and so on. Each time a guest arrives the guests who are already
there move up a room as described above. Trouble is, at one minute
past midnight the hotel is empty - every guest has been moved up and
infinite number of times, so is not in any of the rooms since they all
have finite numbers. So where have they all gone?

I've seen this paradox before. In fact, I posted it in another thread
several months ago -- except with balls in vases, since there was a
very long thread about balls and vases active at the time.

The main difference is that with the original ball-in-vase paradox,
the
balls still exist -- they just aren't in the vase anymore. Here,
apparently
the guests in the rooms don't even _exist_ anymore. If I had been in
one of the rooms at the time, I'd be unable even to tell the tale.
.

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