What The Tortoise Said To Achilles

"So you've got to the end of our race-course?" said the Tortoise. "Even though it does consist
of an infinite series of distances? I thought some wiseacre or other had proved that the thing
couldn't be done?"

"It can be done," said Achilles. "It has been done! Solvitur ambulando. You see the distances
were constatntly diminishing: and so -"

See ? My original reference for Solvitur. :) Now lets see what happend in the story

The tortoise goes on and bashes achilles up and renames him 'A Kill Ease'. Heh Heh. The gist
goes like this:

The tortoise and achilles write down three lines

(A) Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other.
(B) The two sides of the Triangle are things that are equal to the same.
(Z) The two sides of this Triangle are equal to each other.

Now when achilles asks the tortoise to accept that Z is true based on A and B ( Much like the
crap we got in CAT :) ), the tortoise refuses to do so saying that he has every right to say
that he wont accept Z is true.

Achilles goes on and brings in another statement to trap the tortoise

(C) If A and B are true, Z must be true.

Now he says, ' Now that you accept C follows A & B and is true then Z is true'. The tortoise
stubbornly sticks to his stand, and refuses to accept Z to be true.

Poor achilles keeps adding thousands of Cs, Ds, Es and God knows what else and finally gives
up.

The whole, objective of Caroll's witty essay i beleive is to say that all accepted ground
rules of things like logic / science are all based stuff which, um, are not based on Logic at
all.

Its like this:

"hey all, il be coming to work stark naked from tomorrow and will walk with my hands for the
next 10 days" If someone complains that its against convention ( the 'logic' ) il go ahead and say that it is no more illogical than coming to work in business suits and walking on two feet.

Heh heh. Now Iam bloody sure that neither the tortoise not Caroll would av cracked the CAT. Now I beleive that Achilles himself made a mistake. He shud have shoved the notebook up the tortoise's ass as soon it began acting up. :)

Here's a link to the original story in Caroll's own words

http://www.lewiscarroll.org/achilles.html

ciao