How can an object (say, car) accelerate from some velocity to another if there is an infinite number of velocities it has to attain first?

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E.g. how can the car accelerate from rest to 5m/s if it first has to be going at 10^(-100) m/s which in turn requires it to have gone through 10^(-1000) m/s, etc.? That is, if a car is going at a speed of 5m/s, doesn’t that mean the magnitude of its speed has gone through all numbers in the interval [0,5], meaning it’s gone through all the numbers in [0,10^(-100000) ], etc.? How can it do that in a finite amount of time?

In: Mathematics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The easiest answer is that the universe isn’t infinitely divisible. Quantum physics means there is a minimum amount of size, distance, time, and energy. One you divide down to that minimum number you must stop dividing.

So let’s say you need to move 256 of these units. You first need to move 128 of these units. But you must first move 64 of those units, or 32, or 16, or 8, or 4, or 2, or 1. I’ve you are down to one you successfully move the one, then the next one, etc.

Planck time, the smallest unit of time, is 10^-44 seconds. Which is roughly 10^-35.

So in the first plank time it would move 1 planck distance, in the second planck time it would move 3 planck distance, etc.

You may ask “how does it cross the space”? The scar is that it doesn’t, things basically teleport at the smallest level. In reality it’s more complex like that as we are all clouds of probability and nothing actually exists in any specific place, but teleporting planck distances in planck time is the most comprehensive explanation.

Also, we invented calculus to mathematically solve the problem of infinite series in finite containers.

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