If you start with the premise that this person was clearly uneducated then it's not necessarily as stupid as you might think.
Fun fact, determining the distance along the border of a coastline is dependent upon the resolution or scale of the map. The higher resolution your map gets, the distance of the border increases dramatically to the point where it just gets utterly ridiculous.
The thing is, Math and science are absolutely full of weird shit like that, especially when you look at specific problems from a certain kind of perspective.
And there is a long ass list of weird facts about circles and spheres that are really, genuinely unintuitive to the average person. Mathematically, Circles and spheres get weird really god damn quick.
I bet you anything the person who searched that saw a video introducing some quirky factoids about circles or spheres and was just curious.
The difficulty of determining the exact coastline length increases exponentially, but the actual length doesn't because you're using increasingly small length scales. There's no such thing as "infinite" surface area, it just becomes functionally impossible to measure after a certain point.
For practical purposes, you select a length scale based on the level of desired accuracy.
The length of a fractal generally does in fact diverge to infinity. A fractal is a shape whose dimension is between two integers. A fractal can have infinite length for the same reason a square has infinite length. Length is only a meaningful metric for one-dimensional objects.
Picking a resolution doesn't really help you when the issue is that length is not really an intrinsic property of the shape. If you were to actually measure at a microscopic resolution, you would get some incredibly large number for your "length" that has no practical meaning.
I have no issues with infinity. I specifically bounded my response with two things; measurable real-world distance and surface area. Not path length.
Gabriel's horn has theoretically infinite length, therefore the fact that it would theoretically have infinite surface area is irrelevant in practical real-world measurable terms.
Fractal sponge surface area increases exponentially until they approach infinity as (n) increases, but never reach infinity. This applies to any real world object outside the realm of theoretical mathematics.
Each (n) gices you a lower bound on the length. That the sequence of lower bounds increases without upper bound means the only sensible answer you can give for the length is "infinite"
In real objects, length becomes incoherent to talk about past a certain resolution anyway. Atoms are fuzzy when you zoom in enough
The concept of infinity doesn't apply to a real-world coastline for the same reason the rules for a "perfect" sphere don't apply in real-world physics.
In my original reply, I brought up measurement for that exact reason. I'm not talking in the purely theoretical.
They think basically because you can zoom in on things forever (relative to the human understanding of size), it is "infinite". They've convinced themselves that drawing the exact edge of a map and measuring a coastline are not only the same thing, but infinite.
Fascinating to see people like this out in the wild. Shocked they are able to dress themselves tbh.
wild that your saying this while the coastline problem IS a WELL ACCEPTED problem within high level mathematics. While people were saying some dumb crap, the idea that they are just stupid for thinking in the realm of the purely theoretical is just some anti intellectual bullshit. The idea of fractals, and how those ideas can be applied to the real world, are absolutely fun and interesting topics to discuss, and it makes me sad that your so aggressively against discussing them.
Teachers use abstraction to simplify the real world into ways that can be understood within the confines of a school house. Many people treat these abstraction as gospel because they were never taught the true complexity of most topics.
the person misstated the actual question they meant to ask. This is from jjk where a character creates a perfect sphere that touches all objects at an infinitely SMALL surface area and destroys it immediately
Pressure is force / surface area so any force / 0.00000..........01 is a very high pressure
That's... not how physics works at all, even if you have a perfect sphere, you will need a perfect plane to create infinity pressure, and the moment that the plane deforms, it does not work anymore.
I think they are refering to the same predicament as when calculating a shoreline. The measuring unit greatly impacts the measured outcome. the coastline paradox .
I believe OP is refering to this, but applied to polyhedrons. Example: when rendering a spherical 3d model, it gets divided up into a triangular mesh. A higher mesh resolution yields more triangles. The more triangles you use, the higher the surface area of that 3d model would become. But the surface area would still never surpass 4πr².
A better question would be: how many sides in a perfect circle, or how many faces on a perfect sphere. The answer to both is 0 and infinity
Or brain fart and fumbling surface area instead of points or symmetry. A sphere has a lot of infinite things to it, but surface area def isn't one of them
I mean while it is kinda a stupid question I get it. When I was younger I’d probably look up something stupid similarly after learning about things like the perimeter of fractals
Technically the perfect sphere in JJK works. It doesn’t have infinite surface area. It does damage because it contacts you with an infinitely small area, which means that the force is multiplied infinitely and it cuts right through you.
Still not in line with actual physics, but far more realistic than this
I looked that up once because I heard a guy say it and thought it was bullshit. I'm glad to see other people in the area of fact checking nowadays. (I choose a charitable interpretation.)
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u/qualityvote2 9h ago
Heya u/14AUDDIN! And welcome to r/NonPoliticalTwitter!
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