Was Zeno right?

Question

Much ingenuity has been used to explain Zeno's paradoxes. But might not the simplest answer be that movement is indeed an illusion? (For example if we are living in a computer simulation or whatever.)

Answer 1

No, the simplest answer might be that Zeno was wrong.

That was actually the whole point of his paradoxes: to point out that there was something fundamentally wrong with the mathematical logic being used, since it led to a conclusion that was clearly seen to be false.

This doesn't really have any bearing on whether or not actual movement is an illusion. It is, like all mathematical arguments, ultimately a statement about the consequemces of the mathematical formalism, and doesn't have to have any connection to the real world in order to be valid. It's just that making real-world analogies makes it a lot easier to understand.

The fundamental flaw in Zeno's paradoxes was to give a process of dividing a finite quantity into an infinite number of finite pieces, while at the same time believing that an infinite number of finite pieces could never sum to a finite quantity. There is an obvious contradiction here, which was resolved by recognising that an infinite number of finite terms could indeed have a finite sum if the terms got small enough quickly enough.