Eli5 why the coastline paradox is a paradox?
In: 1301
Because it’s infinite recursion and there’s no defined ending point.
Every time you “zoom” into a piece of the coastline you want to measure, you are able to get more accurate measurements if you were to “zoom” into it more.
Imagine a brick as the coastline. We could say it’s one brick long, and a brick is (for example) 6 inches long and 2 inches wide. We can zoom into the brick though, and notice that it’s not perfectly flat. It has some roughness to it as any object does. If you try to measure that roughness, you get a more accurate measurement of how long and wide the brick is.
With powerful microscopes you can try to measure it atom by atom, and get a measurement of how long and wide a brick is with atoms.
However, is that enough for a coastline? Coastlines aren’t bricks. They’re constantly changing and being eroded. The roughness of the coastline/the brick is constantly changing. It’s not reasonable to try to measure a coastline, in this sense. Every day it changes on all fronts, and the changes may be minuscule to us, but for the purposes of *measurement* and accurate record keeping, it’s moot. The changes that occur are the precision that we need, and if you try to measure it only be feet, you will wind up with a dramatic % error by the time you’re done counting up millions of miles.
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