Weird Thoughts about Scale

When I was a kid my Dad told me about this theory that you could never actually get anywhere you were going. The idea behind the theory is, say you are standing at point A and needing to get to point B. In between points A and B is the halfway point — let’s call it X. So before you get to B, you come to X. At that point, X becomes A (because there you are) and you still need to get to B. But between the new A and the original B is another X, the new halfway point. Based on this logic, you can never really reach B.

I tried this theory one time in either second or third grade, on my way to the pencil sharpener. After about seven minutes of taking minute steps, the teacher told me to either sharpen my pencil or go sit down. So much for science!

Using similar logic, I once decided that I could carry an infinite amount of paper. My reasoning was that since a single piece of paper weighs essentially nothing, I could always carry “one more” piece of paper. The trick, I think, is to add them one piece at a time. You can’t just pick up a 2,000 pound pile of paper. That’s going from 0 to 2,000 pounds, and that’s impossible. But don’t you think if you were carrying, oh, a hundred pound stack of paper, that you could carry one additional piece of paper? Me too.

Along those same lines I once decided I could an entire beach in the pocket of my swimming suit. Doesn’t it seem like, if you used tweezers, there would always be room for one more speck of sand in your pocket?

Sometimes, one speck of sand makes all the difference in the world.