Kinematics – How Can Any Instantaneous Velocity Exist?

differentiationdiscretekinematicstimevelocity

I have read about Zeno's arrow paradox that tells us there is no motion of the arrow at a particular instant of its flight. It can be inferred that there can be no velocity at any instant. Moreover we cannot calculate velocity at any instant in the real world (of course it can be done by using calculus) but how can this be possible? What is the intuition behind this concept?

Best Answer

Zeno used his paradoxes to proof movement was impossible. But of course he knew movement existed! If you were going to punch him, he will not trust your fist would have to get infinite times half of the way before reaching him; he would try to avoid it. His philosophical motivation was to "stirr" the reason, show that by logical arguments we can fall into wrong conclusions, ergo incurring in fallacies. This was a big thing, because in the age of the reason, someone shown that logic may take us nowhere.

I imagine it was the equivalent in modern times to Heisenberg Principle in Quantum Mechanics, where in the age where science was believed to be infinitely precise, it was shown that there were unmeasurable things in Physics (the flagship of science!); or Gödel's theorem, where he shown that there are things in Mathematics that cannot be proven right or wrong.

From a conceptual point of view, instantaneous velocity is a limit: if you compute the average velocity ($\Delta x / \Delta t$) for every smaller values of $\Delta t$, you will see that it nicely converges to a value: this is the instantaneous velocity.

From an experimental point of view, this is unreachable. You cannot measure arbitrarily small periods of time just because your equipment has a limit. Also, your measurement of the position has a precision too. Error analysis will show you that, assuming the velocity is constant along an interval, and for noisy measurements of $x$ and $t$, the bigger the step, the more accurate the measurement will be. For a real movement, where the velocity is not constant, expanding the interval will increase the error introduced by variability. If you have an idea of the evolution of the velocity (for example, the second derivative computed from the last few points), one could estimate the optimal interval for maximum precision.

From a theoretical physics point of view, things get weirder. You cannot trully define the position, or the momentum, with infinite precision. And if you go to very small scales, and very short times, you will hit the weirdness of Plank foam: where time and space are predicted to not behave in any intuitive way.

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