Sim glitch re: Halford numbers - the paradox of the WORM and the RUBBER BAND
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Date: August 10th, 2015 3:17 AM Author: Brilliant exciting state messiness
Suppose that a useless PISSworm crawls along a 1-metre rubber band at the same time as the rubber band is uniformly stretched. If the worm travels 1 centimetre per minute and the band stretches 1 metre per minute, will the worm ever reach the end of the rubber band?
The answer, counterintuitively, is "yes", for after n minutes, the ratio of the distance travelled by the worm to the total length of the rubber band is
\frac{1}{100}\sum_{k=1}^n\frac{1}{k}
(In fact the actual ratio is a little less than this sum as the band expands continuously). The reason is that the band expands behind the worm also; eventually, the worm gets past the midway mark and the band behind expands increasingly more rapidly than the band in front.
Because the series gets arbitrarily large as n becomes larger, eventually this ratio must exceed 1, which implies that the worm reaches the end of the rubber band. However, the value of n at which this occurs must be extremely large: approximately e100, a number exceeding 10^44.
The exact value of n is 15092688622113788323693563264538101449859497.
Although the harmonic series does diverge, it does so very slowly.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2959236&forum_id=2],#28519125) |
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