Fletcher's Paradox - Lynds' Resolution or not?

[Talanic]

Hi there. I was wondering recently about the Fletcher's Paradox, and Peter Lynds' solution - the idea that time can't truly be measured in individual instants.

Now, I'm not actually a physicist - just a science fiction writer. But has anyone proposed the alternate solution that motion is an inherent characteristic of a moving object? After all, don't Einstein's theories indicate that an object's mass increases with its speed? This would seem to say that, in a frozen moment, velocity would still exist as an innate property.

I could be entirely off base here, but I was curious.

 

[pellman]

I'm sort of with you on velocity as an inherent characteristic. If you think of an object not as a 3D thing which changes from moment to moment but as a (static) 4D thing, then the velocity is just a sort of tangent vector to the 4D object at a certain point in spacetime.

 

[MaxwellsDemon]

The Fletcher's Paradox (one of Zeno's Paradoxes I think) is generally agreed to have been resolved by mathematicians centuries ago using results from infinite series and calculus. The Fletcher's Paradox in particular can be thought of as an example of a geometric series...what Zeno (and apparently Peter Lynds) failed to realize is that you can add up an infinite number of terms and still obtain a finite answer. As for motion being an intrinsic property of an object, this isn't a new idea...thats the idea underlying momentum. Aristotle thought that a force was necessary to keep an object at motion and that its natural state was at rest. Momentum in Newton's physics stands in opposition to this idea...instead uniform motion is viewed as the natural state, and a force is required to accelerate. You should read up on the difference between instantaneous and average velocity.