the coastline paradox.
In: Earth Science
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
If you add a bump to a line, the line gets longer.
If you measure a coastline, for example, there’s a lot of detail to consider. Each detail is a bump in an otherwise straight line.
If you’d measure all levels of detail, the line will have a heck load of bumps.
Those bumps make the line really long.
The “paradox” term is loosely applied. It refers to how you can seemingly always go finer in detail, hence no measurement is universally “correct” in a strict sense.
Though, practically, even if you assume discrete space and, say, the Planck length or something as a smallest unit, the “correct” measurement would be useless. Taking all that detail into account (assuming for the sake of argument that atoms and all were completely static while measuring) would leave you with a ridiculously bumpy line, and thus a ridiculously huge length.
It might turn out (and I’ll just pick a random number for simplicity’s sake) that the coastline of Great Britain is 500 trillion kilometres long. Even if that were the “correct” measurement, it would be useless. It’s a ridiculously high number, way out of scale for any application of it we’d have.
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