Will Zehring wrote:
>Now Jay comes along and tells me that I can't even start the
>restoration, much less stop it. My head hurts.
Sorry about that, Will. Here, have a virtual aspirin.
It was really just a proposed corollary to the Fisher-Wakeman Law. You
can't define intermediate states in relation to the final state when the
final state itself is undefined. Halfway to infinity is still infinity, and
you're left in an indeterminate form.
The solution, of course, is to take the derivative of the MG and invoke
L'Hopital's rule to find the limit of restoration. The only hitch is that
you'd first have to prove the MG is a continuous function.
If you'd like, we could call in Plato on this one. He'd tell you your MG is
just a shadow cast by the one ideal MG onto the wall of a cave. Bringing
the car to a state identical to the ideal is hopeless if that's the goal of
restoration. He'd probably also tell you your MG doesn't even exist, but I
wouldn't go that far.
There was once a guy who almost achieved the ideal. The last thing he did
was install a meticulously calibrated speedometer. Too bad it would
determine the car's momentum so precisely that according to Heisenberg it
could be anywhere in the universe.
Ugh. Blurring the line between mathematics and philosophy makes MY head hurt.
--
Jay Tilton | jtilton@vt.edu
|