My Thought Experiment (about Infinity/Thermodymanics)

[Luminal]

I don't think this belongs in the pseudoscience section, because everything I am describing is simple, accepted science and activities, but applied in a way to make us think about infinity.

 

Let's say that you were driving in a Volkswagen Beetle and your MPG is, say, 20. You add 300 pounds of bricks to the back seat, and your MPG decreases to, say, 15. The accuracy of these numbers isn't very relevant.

 

Now, you keep removing bricks, and your MPG creeps further and further back toward 20, but doesn't reach it. Finally, you remove everything from the car that wasn't there previously, except one electron, or 1/1840th of a Dalton. Will your MPG be affected by 1 electron? Who knows, but let's apply it to an even more extreme case to make a point.

 

You then take that electron, and put it on a cruiseliner (which, for the sake of this discussion, is using gallons to measure its fuel efficiency, rather than a larger figure, but it using a more powerful fuel).

 

You keep increasing the size of the vessel or vehicle you are in, and the elctron is reletively less and less important to the MPG (not as though it was relevant to begin with). At some point, adding that electron's mass would not require another molecule of fuel to be burned to carry its weight. Or, you could apply a similar thought experiment with a quark, but it doesn't matter.

 

When it crosses this threshold where adding an electron to the mass of the moving object doesn't change the fuel efficiency, because no additional molecules of fuel must be burned to carry that particle across a distance, what are the implications for thermodynamics? Infinity?

 

To completely finalize the point, you could also keep decreasing the distance traveled by the relatively massive moving object (billions of tons in mass at this point), to such a small amount (say, several nanometers), that it's going to burn the exact same amount of fuel, down to the molecules, even if many particles were removed or added.

 

Thoughts?

[swansont]

You're trying to mix a real-life example with a purely theoretical ideal. Real-life has a discrete size limit, and statistical variations, and limits to detection. You can't really mix-and-match and come up with a meaningful conclusion.

[insane_alien]

it would theoretically always have an effect but this effect will drop below current measurement capabilities quite quickly especially since we wouldn't be able to measure it if the car was the size of a microbe.