Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Main academic task right now

My main academic task right now is revising my Infinity, Causation and Paradox book manuscript in light of referee comments. One of the tasks a referee set me is including more diagrams (the original only had one). This is a fun break from writing. I'm doing some of the drawings with TikZ right in the LaTeX file, and some I'm drawing with Inkscape.

Here's Smullyan's rod with exponentially decreasing density (to ensure finite total force). It's a rigid rod suspended over an infinite plane, and it can't fall down because then it would hit the plane but on the other hand it's never in contact with the plane. Art it's not.


4 comments:

Red said...

Is this book about Hume-Edwards principle ?

Alexander R Pruss said...

No, though I think I have a brief discussion of it.

Unknown said...

Good point by reviewer. Every material with good deal of mathematics should include graphic elements. With them it is much easier to follow text. I hope that all your work on book will be over in 2017!

Alexander R Pruss said...

I suppose it used to be expensive to have diagrams made, but with modern free tools (and not so modern: TikZ and Inkscape are each well over a decade old), authors can do it all by themselves, even without any artistic skill (though admittedly my Smullyan's rod is ugly).