Essay Abstract
In this essay I shall defend the thesis that physics is about motion and that motion, as classical Greek philosophy has exhaustively demonstrated, is not tractable in any discrete domain of argument. For more than two millennia to come were Zeno's Paradoxes respected as the collegial advice: Do not open this box! Physics, as the science of motion, came of age only with Newton's fluxions and Leibniz' differentials, which rather than dissolving the paradox of motion, escaped it. Arguments will be presented in support of the thesis that infinitesimal calculus was the reason for the literally un-reason-able effectiveness of mathematics in physics and that the 'arithmetization of the continuum', i.e. the 'opening of the box', turned physics from the science of motion back to the affirmative logic of states in historical time.
Author Bio
H.H.J. Luediger holds a Dipl. Ing. degree in telecommunications technologies and has a keen interest in the theory of science.
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