zeno infinity submission

1. MUSIC OF THE EMPTY SPHERES<br />The world will little note nor long remember the music I have written. For one thing there hasn’t been that much of it. I once tried to get a music professor friend to give his opinion on what is the fewest number of Etudes that Chopin could have written and still be considered a great composer. Nothing but equivocation from my friend, however. I’m sure though that it would require more music than I have written before I will be considered great.<br />I have always like rests. Especially those little rectangular half measure rests that are not heavy enough to fall over the staff line and become full measure rests. Although those little squiggly quarter note rests are appealing also, but I think it is mostly their visual form that I like. Of course Cage’s master piece 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds will forever stand out as the most masterful example of using rests, but still there is room to explore.<br />Anyway, I wrote a piece with both left and right hand rests. The left hand had two half measure rests while the right had a full measure rest. But that sounded pretty dull so I set the metronome for the left hand at 50 beats per minute and the right hand had 100 beats per minute. This seemed only fair since the left had to rest twice as often.<br />But then just to put a little more musical complexity into the piece, I thought I might as well start the left hand 50 measures into the 100 measure piece and see if the rests sounded good together. However the left hand never quite caught up—rhythm challenged is a common northern European syndrome. So I extended the piece to 1000 measures but kept the same 50 measure head start for the right hand. That seemed to improve the timing for the two hands so I asked my music professor friend to listen to the piece. He thought it would be improved if the right hand had four quarter measure rests since the time between the rests would be greater if there were four per measure and maybe my two hands would actually finish at the same time. But then the fun began when a philosopher friend stopped by (uninvited, I note) and told the musician that of course the right hand would always finish first since its metronome was going faster. After arguing through several beers, I insisted that we settle the matter by just doing the experiment and see which hand finished first. Of course, neither the philosopher nor the musician wanted to end the interesting argument so we argued about settling it for a while, but I finally convinced them to do the experiment.<br /> One would certainly think that a clear experiment like this would settle the issue, but both heard my hands finish at different times. This is quite ridiculous because I was playing and know that my right hand finished before the left but the musician claimed I thought that because I was just an amateur musician and the philosopher thought the musician was wrong because obviously the musician couldn’t understand the implications of multiplying nothing by higher numbers. We ended up agreeing to pass the question on to the Zeno Group: who finishes first if you are not doing anything?<br />