I fully admit I do not really understand what they are talking about, and that my brain plasticity at my age is already probably too low to ever actually feel like I have the energy to really get into it But it's a real thing, and it works
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But infinite force can't exist, doesn't mean anything, and what this actually adds up to instead is the "residue", the -1/12, i.e. a very small negative number -- a force that goes the opposite direction and attracts things together, but only at a very small distance
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Yes, actual physicists, I don't know what I'm talking about The point here is just me dreaming of one of the many things in heaven and earth I hadn't previously had in my philosophy
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The knowledge that a summation of 1+2+3+4...=-1/12 exists doesn't affect my life -- if I am ever asked to add up all of the natural numbers I will probably stop at 1+2+3=6, honestly -- nor is the proof that they gave the real, final proof
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But damn if it isn't a beautiful, powerful demonstration that you can fuck around with seemingly simple things and open a Pandora's Box of wonders
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Like the motto of Stephen Fry's show QI, "If you can't be right, be interesting" At every step along this process someone could have, like Dostoyevsky's coxcomb, blocked the path and waved their arms and said "No you can't do that turn back"
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(Hell, the ancient Greeks, who believed you could not in fact do that, were still pretty lax traffic cops and didn't *enforce* not doing that because they didn't have the rigor, which is why Archimedes was allowed to discover a limit-based method for approximating pi)
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But it's always more interesting to just ignore him and keep walking anyway I mean what's the worst that can happen? You try to say something makes sense but everyone just looks at it a while and goes "Nah this is stupid" and moves on? You gotta at least try
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End of conversation
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