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Showing posts from October, 2018

Is 0.999... = 1? (spoiler alert: no it is not)

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You may have encountered the popular claim that \( 0.999... = 1 \), where the three dots signify that the decimal continues forever. This is a somewhat weird claim, since it would mean that mathematics is broken. There should be no way for two different numbers to have the same value. What makes it weirder is that this is quite popular claim. I've even seen mathematicians say that it's true! But is it though? One popular proof is to first denote \( S = 0.999...\) and then multiply by \(10\) to get \( 10S = 9.999...\) and subtract \( S \) from it, to get  \( 10S - S = 9.000...\) and finally dividing by \(9\) yields  \( S = 1.000... = 1 \) and we see that  \(0.999... = 1\)! However, there's a problem. This short derivation is not strictly speaking correct. It is veeeery close to being correct, and to see why let's look at finite decimals first. Let's say that \(S = 0.999\) (note that this is not the same as \(S = 0.999...\) ). Let's do the same trick as ...
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The Nobel prize in physics 2018: light all the way

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As you probably know, the 2018 Nobel prize in physics went to optics and photonics. I cannot say I am surprised, since a lot of the physics Nobel prizes are awarded to this area, either directly or indirectly. It's still nice to see that the people who really deserve recognition are finally getting it. But what is their research really about, and why should we care? Let's start with Arhur Ashkin, who at the age of 96 years, is the oldest Nobel Laureate ever. Ashkin received one half of the prize “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”. Optical tweezers are exactly what they sound like, a tool used to trap and manipulate minuscule things. The tweezers were born from the observation that a dielectric particle tends to move towards the highest intensity in a beam of light. So if the particle you are trapping moves to the edge of the beam, a restoring force will move it back towards the center. This force can be explained for Rayleigh s...
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