Joseph Mazur > Quotes

“And our understanding of that motion remains fundamentally paradoxical.”
― Joseph Mazur, Zeno's Paradox: Unraveling the Ancient Mystery Behind the Science of Space and Time

“Time dilation, inconstancy of mass, and special relativity suggest that motion is indeed illusory.”
― Joseph Mazur, Zeno's Paradox: Unraveling the Ancient Mystery Behind the Science of Space and Time

“After the death of Archimedes in 212 BCE, the topic of motion was effectively abandoned; it did not resurface for another 1,400 years, when Gerard of Brussels revived the mathematical works of Euclid and Archimedes and came very close to defining speed as a ratio of distance to time.”
― Joseph Mazur, Zeno's Paradox: Unraveling the Ancient Mystery Behind the Science of Space and Time

“But no matter how finely calibrated our clocks are, they are always measuring something discrete—an interval, a repeating signal, a duration between events. This is the heart of the problem: We measure time as a duration and think of motion as continuous. The best definition of motion we have is intricately tangled between the discrete and continuous impressions of time and space.”
― Joseph Mazur, Zeno's Paradox: Unraveling the Ancient Mystery Behind the Science of Space and Time

“It is through Galileo that the connection between math and the physical world became solidified.”
― Joseph Mazur, Zeno's Paradox: Unraveling the Ancient Mystery Behind the Science of Space and Time