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Comment by monjaro | Hacker News Reader

This article is very low quality. The account of Zeno's paradox is wrong on pretty much every count, which makes it hard to trust anything else the article claims.

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The Ask A Mathematician page linked is quite a bit better.

http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/03/q-is-the-quantum-ze...

You're right, that's a much better article.

Tabloid level at best, indeed. I dropped after the second paragraph. Its obvious the guy understands shit about Science and about Greek science in particular. Take one theory out f context and loosely tie it with quantum physics and you have enough paper for your next toilet trip.

Seems okay to me - what precisely do you think they got wrong?

"He did this by setting up a series of paradoxes that showed, among other things, that half a given span of time is equal to twice that given span of time, that time and space are neither continuous nor discrete, and that nothing ever moves. Ever."

None of those things are true. One minute isn't equal to four minutes, Zeno didn't prove anything about time and space being neither continuous nor discrete, and things clearly do move.

The only correction I'd make to their sentence is change "showed" to "appeared to show". And his paradoxes did appear to show all those things. Of course empirically you (and the ancient Greeks) could see that they must be wrong - the challenge was to find the logical flaw in his arguments. Finding that took a very long time.

Perhaps I'm being overly pedantic, but in my mind "showed" and "appeared to show" mean very different things.

A low quality article on the Gawker network? Surely not!

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