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Originally Posted by greymule
The fallacy in claiming that there cannot be a tie is the assumption that the moment the ball hits the glove or the foot hits the base can be defined as an infinitesmal point in time, like a theoretical point on a line. If we could in fact define the concept of hits to this degree, then we could legitimately say that the ball never hits the glove at exactly the same time as the foot hits the base. We could by extension say that no two raindrops ever hit the ground at exactly the same moment.
But we cannot define the hits of these occurrences down at the subatomic level. If we had a camera that magnified to a power of a quadrillion, we would not be able to say, "This is the precise moment when the ball hit the glove, and it beat the foot hitting the base by one quadrillionth of a second. Past a certain point far larger than a quadrillionth of a second, all measurement breaks down—because we can't define hits to that degree of precision.
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Femtosecond (fs) = One quadrillionth of a second (10
-15 s).
There are Femtolasers, used in Femtochemistry, for measuring chemical reactions. Maybe we could borrow the one our good friend Ahmed Zewail, California Institute of Technology, has and settle this tie issue once and for all.
