User:JaimeLesMaths/Zeno's Paradoxes mediation

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The mediation for the Zeno's paradoxes article will be held here. Please create a new section with your user name in the section title and respond to the following questions.

1. In your opinion, what is the nature of the dispute?
2. What is the main obstacle to resolving the dispute? (Please, comment only on content or policy, not the contributor.)
3. What sentence would you like to add to the article that would represent your view? Can you cite a source that would verify this sentence?
4. Is there a sentence you would delete from the article? Why do you think it should be deleted?
5. Do you believe that the opposing view meets Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion (specifically WP:ATT)? If not, why not?

I reserve the right to add questions later if necessary. For now, please keep your comments in your section only.

[edit] Itub's view

1. There is IMO a conflict between what I'll call stereotypically the "engineers" (including mathematicians and various scientists) and the "philosophers". I'm clearly in the "engineer" camp. The "engineers" believe that the paradoxes are a mathematical problem, fully solvable using calculus. The "philosophers" believe that the problem has not been solved by calculus and is somehow related to the fundamental physical nature of space (and therefore sprout connections to topics such as quantum mechanics, which IMO as an "engineer" are utterly irrelevant). From an "engineer's" point of view, the main problem is too much undue weight to the view that the paradoxes haven't been solved. As Ken Arromdee put it in the talk page, "I think this whole article is ridiculous. It's like having an article about how the sun produces its energy and prominently describing calculations that show the sun would soon be gone if it got all its energy from coal burning, then listing nuclear fusion under "proposed explanations"" and "We don't have articles about the sun which imply that nuclear fusion hasn't completely solved the problem of where the sun's energy is from, and we don't have articles about evolution which say that scientists "thought" that men evolved from apes but evolution doesn't completely explain how human beings got here. The idea that Zeno's Paradoxes haven't been solved is an extreme minority view and should not be treated as anything more than that.".

2. The main obstacle is the nearly complete lack of references to back up specific statements everywhere in the article.

3. I can't think of a specific wording right now, but anything coming from a book on calculus would be useful to show the "engineer" perspective. See some results from google books for examples.

4. I'd remove for example this whole paragraph below. If you really want a single sentence, take the last sentence in the paragraph. An unattributed POV statement, like many others in the article.

Another way of putting this is as follows: If Zeno's paradox would say that "adding an infinite number of time intervals together would amount to an infinite amount of time", then the calculus-solution is perfectly correct in pointing out that adding an infinite number of intervals can add up to a finite amount of time. However, any descriptions of Zeno's paradox that talk about time make the paradox into a straw man: a weak (and indeed invalid) caricature of the much stronger and much simpler inherent paradox that does not at all consider any quantifications of time. Rather, this much simpler paradox simply states that: "for Achilles to capture the tortoise will require him to go beyond, and hence to finish, going through a series that has no finish, which is logically impossible". The calculus-based solution offers no insight into this much simpler, much more stinging, paradox.

5. Perhaps there are well-recognized philosophers who don't believe that Zeno's paradoxes cannot be solved using math. I don't agree with them, but they can certainly be mentioned in the article with proper attribution. Currently the article even gives a few names at the end; however, they are uncited. Other weasel statements such as "Some claim that a rigorous formulation of the calculus (as the epsilon-delta version of Weierstrass and Cauchy in the 19th century or the equivalent and equally rigorous differential/infinitesimal version by Abraham Robinson in the 20th) has not resolved all problems involving infinities, including Zeno's." need to be attributed properly or deleted. --Itub 10:48, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Closed

I have closed this mediation due to lack of response from the initiator. Please continue to work out this dispute on the article's talk page. If you still require assistance, please leave me a talk page message, and I will try to assist. --JaimeLesMaths ^(talk!edits) 05:01, 26 March 2007 (UTC)