Paradox Tuesday – Tennis Ball Paradox

1. 

   mendel

   April 2, 2013 at 5:33 pm

   Youtube doesn’t want me to comment today.

   Anyway, at 1:00 the narrator says “Thus, in the limit there will be infinitely many balls in the room”, without having established that there is a limit. And in fact, the subsequent argument proves that no such limit set exists.
2. 

   Mr Pickles

   April 3, 2013 at 12:06 am

   It’s a meaningless question. One cannot talk about “stage infininty”. One can say that at stage N, balls N+1 through 2N (or N balls) will be in the room. As N approaches infinity, the number of balls in the room will also approach infinity.
3. 

   David Schwartz

   April 3, 2013 at 12:21 pm

   It makes no sense to ask what happens after a process with an infinite number of discrete steps has been completed. It is not possible to complete a process with an infinite number of discrete steps.
4. 

   Otto Bob Otto

   April 4, 2013 at 9:12 am

   There seems to be some major misunderstandings about infinite limits in general, and many of the videos/proofs play fast and loose with that.

   The real idea behind a limit going to infinity is that, in this case, the number of tennis balls in the room can be made arbitrarily large by repeating this process of enough times. It’s a concept that says the number of tennis balls grows without bound and this process is repeated. There are never an “infinite” number of tennis balls in the room, since a physical process cannot be repeated forever. We can have an arbitrarily large number of tennis balls, and wherever we stop, we CAN name which balls are in the room.
5. 

   kb

   April 22, 2013 at 12:37 am

   the number of balls goes to infty. The set of balls goes to the empty set. Taking cardinality does not commute with taking limits, apparently.

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