Affiliation:
1. Moscow City University; HSE University
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 circum?stance - 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.
Publisher
National Library of Serbia
Subject
Sociology and Political Science,Philosophy
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