Loosed from a bow, the arrow flies. In every moment, past and future, it is wholly where it is. In one moment: nocked. In the next, buried in its target. Wholly nocked, wholly buried. If at any one moment the arrow is still, neither moving to its present location nor away from it, then when does it have time to fly?

Or consider the liar’s march up the hill. To summit, the woman must first ascend half the height. To reach the halfway point, she must first ascend a quarter. Half the distance and half and half again until we reach nanometers. Angstroms. Eventually we will reach an indivisible unit, and we’ll realize then that the student’s journey could never have begun at all.

So says Zeno of Elea.

The Eleatic rendered movement absurd because he didn’t believe in change. Reality is what is, and nothing more: existence cannot spring from nonexistence, but it struck him as equally preposterous to suggest that one state of being could engender a different one. The universe is whole and perfect and unchanging, like a film strip without end. From one frame to the next, nothing actually moves. We live out our lives in a series of perfect, predetermined stills.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

You might empathize better with Diogenes the Cynic. He found the Eleatics’ view of reality laughable. When posed these paradoxes of movement, he simply walked away. But how many cues should we take from a man dressed in a barrel?

Zeno didn’t believe in change; the scientist’s disbelief lies elsewhere. She and the Eleatics do agree on the value of doing things by halves, however. And on the merit of playing games.

Game playing: that’s a common trick for a bored academic, I suppose. Zeno’s favorite was the reductio ad absurdem. It is a good way to win an argument that you shouldn’t. The graduate student prefers the old standby of the sciences: an experiment with a ridiculous hypothesis, with nothing but a beer riding on the results.

The student’s game is one of observation, or attention– perfect for the psychology class in which it’s set. I did say our geneticist was bored. An undergraduate class in a foreign discipline makes an excellent antidote to an excess of spare time, don’t you think?

The student and her friend Sybil have formulated a null hypothesis: two people in a crowd of five hundred are essentially invisible, even if they partake in a well defined, large scale ritual. The ritual in question: split the distance between the front of the auditorium and the back by halves. In the first class, sit at the back. In the second, occupy the center. And so on. The subject is, of course, the professor. He’s the only one in the position to notice, you see.

Neither the student nor Syb believes for a second that they’ll be caught out. But it’s a silly little experiment and even I am convinced that our scientist truly likes those.