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The thought experiment concerns a lamp that is toggled on and off with increasing frequency. Thomson's lamp is a philosophical puzzle based on infinites. It was devised in 1954 by British philosopher James F. Thomson, who used it to analyze the possibility of a supertask, which is the completion of an infinite number of tasks.
In philosophy, a supertask is a countably infinite sequence of operations that occur sequentially within a finite interval of time. [1] Supertasks are called hypertasks when the number of operations becomes uncountably infinite .
However, Paul Benacerraf in a 1962 paper [5] successfully criticised Thomson's argument, by pointing out that the states of the lamp during the experiment do not logically determine the final state of the lamp when t=1. Thomson's conditions for the experiment are insufficiently complete, since only instants of time before t≡1 are considered.
For example, the statement "If Joseph Swan had not invented the modern incandescent light bulb, then someone else would have invented it anyway" is a counterfactual, because, in fact, Joseph Swan invented the modern incandescent light bulb. The most immediate task concerning counterfactuals is that of explaining their truth-conditions.
The method attempts to eliminate the buffers that slow down plane boarding, [2] while simultaneously optimising speed and efficiency. The method has been criticised for its lack of human headway, as it would separate those boarding in groups, require a perfectly organised line, as well as uniform stowing and seating time.
Indeed, set theory has been formalized as the Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF). One of the axioms of ZF is the axiom of infinity, that essentially says that the natural numbers form a set. All mathematics has been rewritten in terms of ZF. In particular, line, curves, all sort of spaces are defined as the set of their points.
The meaning of the term supertask in popular computer science and in hypercomputing agrees with the one from mathematics and philosophy. There is no need for additional definition of supertask in the context of computer science. As far as the article about supertasks in multi-processor scheduling is concerned , this is just one of the uses ...
Considering the Hafele–Keating experiment in a frame of reference at rest with respect to the center of the Earth (because this is an inertial frame [3]), a clock aboard the plane moving eastward, in the direction of the Earth's rotation, had a greater velocity (resulting in a relative time loss) than one that remained on the ground, while a ...