Zeno’s paradoxes and the quantum microworld: What the aporias convey

Abstract

The article considers new approaches to four of Zeno’s paradoxes: the Arrow, Achilles and the Tortoise, the Dichotomy, and the Stadium. The paradoxes are analyzed in the light of current research in the field of elementary particle physics and some promising directions in the development of the quantum gravity. Physical theories, provided with the necessary philosophical interpretation, are used in order to clarify Zeno’s paradoxes and to search for answers to them. The text shows that using modern approaches to solve the paradoxes is not effective, because the paradoxes become irrelevant when analyzed in the context of microworld physics, at very small scales. The main part of the paper is devoted to demonstrating this circum­stance - that the questions posed by the paradoxes are impossible to answer (at least in their classical interpretation). As a possible explanation, the article puts forward that in the formulation of the paradoxes, the properties of the macroworld and the microworld are mixed (which is historically justified, given the intuitive homogeneity of the large and the small, and the fact that non-classical physics - quantum mechanics - did not emerge until the twentieth century); that is, from the observation of large physical objects, a transition is made to the infinitely small in terms of discreteness and continuity. However, the principles of organization of space at very small scales are beginning to be clarified in general terms only now, and, perhaps, these principles may turn out to be quite far from the classical ideas about fundamental physical reality.

Keywords

• zeno’s paradoxes
• philosophy of science
• macroworld
• microworld
• duality
• space
• time
• motion
• continuity