Question I cannot understand how things move. Consider the leading point of a pool ball: for the ball to move, that leading point has to dematerialise from Point A and materialise at Point B. When I attempt to explain this to others, they invariably respond with something along the lines of 'But it just moves a small distance'. This is what causes me a problem because, regardless of the distance moved, small or large, the leading edge of the pool ball must be in one place at one moment, and the next moment, it is in a different place. What else can this be other than dematerialisation / materialisation. Which, as I understand, is not possible. So how do things move?

Accepted:
February 21, 2008

Comments

I shall begin with a 'philosophical' kind of answer, the kind of answer that philosophers ever since Aristotle's time might have given. (Indeed, it is closely related to the answers that Aristotle himself gave to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Perhaps you're already familiar with those paradoxes: but, if not, then I'd invite you to look them up, for you might enjoy pondering them). I think the flaw in your question lies in that phrase "the next moment". In the case of space, you seem to be treating it as continuous in the sense that, between any two points, no matter how close they might be, there will still be further spatial points between them -- so that to jump straight from one to the other would have to involve some sort of teleportation, bypassing all those intervening points. And yet (as a philosopher might tell you) time itself is equally continuous, and in exactly the same way. At any given moment of time, there is simply no such thing as the next moment. The continuous nature of time means that, between any two moments, let's call them t0 and t1, there must be an intervening moment, call it t0.5. And, between t0 and t0.5, a further moment, t0.25. And then also t0.125, t0.0625, t0.03125, etc., all standing between you and the moment you initially took to be the 'next' one. In a certain sense (and I don't intend this as an account of how motion works physically; just how it could work, logically), the mistake is to try to build up a big motion out of lots of little ones. The big motion ought to be the starting point. (It is said that Diogenes' response, when he heard Zeno spouting off about his 'proof' that motion was impossible, was simply to walk across the room!). Once you have the entire motion, between A and B, only then should you start to break it down and contemplate its component parts: getting half way between them by t0.5, getting a quarter of the way by t0.25, etc. The fact that there is no mathematical end to this process of breaking the motion down -- as opposed to trying to build it up from its 'least' parts -- means that there is no moment at which the object has to cross any real distance at all.

That, as I say, is the kind of answer that a 'philosopher' might give: but, particularly when it comes down to the kinds of topics that are nowadays studied by physicists, we philosophers ought to accept that we can't do everything on our own. (I've mentioned Aristotle already in this reply. Of course, in his day, there was no distinction to be drawn between a philosopher and a physicist -- but that's no longer the case). Now, I am not a physicist, and so here I cannot even pretend to approach the full story. But, for a start, quantum mechanists seem quite comfortable with the notion that an object might indeed just dematerialise from one place and materialise in another. Indeed, according to quantum mechanics, it's not at all clear that an object is ever in any fully determinate place at all. And then the string theorists will go on to tell you that, when you get down to the level of something called the "Planck length" (of the order of 10-35 metres, about a trillion trillion times smaller than something already as tiny as an atom -- a shorter distance than I suspect your friends could ever even have approached imagining!), alongside something called the "Planck time" (of the order of 10-44 seconds -- if anything, even more mind-bogglingly tiny!), then everything to do with space and time starts to go a bit haywire. For a start, there are ten dimensions down there! Now, it's not yet clear where all this cutting-edge physical research is going: but, who knows, maybe space and time will turn out not to be quite as continuous as Aristotle suggested after all. Although space and time certainly do still remain fascinating topics for philosophers, and philosophers surely do still have something to offer in this area, Einstein and his ilk taught us that we're not really competent to lay down the law about them on the basis of pure a priori speculation alone.

But, rather like Diogenes, I'm tempted just to get up and walk across the room. No one seriously believes that motion doesn't exist: the philosophers will explain how it's possible that there should be such a thing at all, and the physicists will endeavour to find the laws of nature that explain how it actually works in the real world.