|
The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set-theoretic geometry, which states the following: Given a solid ball in 3‑dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. Indeed, the reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them, without changing their shape. However, the pieces themselves are not "solids" in the usual sense, but infinite scatterings of points. The reconstruction can work with as few as five pieces. A stronger form of the theorem implies that given any two "reasonable" solid objects (such as a small ball and a huge ball), either one can be reassembled into the other. This is often stated informally as "a pea can be chopped up and reassembled into the Sun" and called the "pea and the Sun paradox". The reason the Banach–Tarski theorem is called a paradox is that it contradicts basic geometric intuition. "Doubling the ball" by dividing it into parts and moving them around by rotations and translations, without any stretching, bending, or adding new points, seems to be impossible, since all these operations ''ought'', intuitively speaking, to preserve the volume. The intuition that such operations preserve volumes is not mathematically absurd and it is even included in the formal definition of volumes. However, this is not applicable here, because in this case it is impossible to define the volumes of the considered subsets, as they are chosen with such a large porosity. Reassembling them reproduces a volume, which happens to be different from the volume at the start. Unlike most theorems in geometry, the proof of this result depends in a critical way on the choice of axioms for set theory. It can be proven using the axiom of choice, which allows for the construction of nonmeasurable sets, i.e., collections of points that do not have a volume in the ordinary sense, and whose construction requires an uncountable number of choices.〔Wagon, Corollary 13.3〕 It was shown in 2005 that the pieces in the decomposition can be chosen in such a way that they can be moved continuously into place without running into one another. == Banach and Tarski publication == In a paper published in 1924, Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski gave a construction of such a paradoxical decomposition, based on earlier work by Giuseppe Vitali concerning the unit interval and on the paradoxical decompositions of the sphere by Felix Hausdorff, and discussed a number of related questions concerning decompositions of subsets of Euclidean spaces in various dimensions. They proved the following more general statement, the strong form of the Banach–Tarski paradox: : Given any two bounded subsets and of an Euclidean space in at least three dimensions, both of which have a nonempty interior, there are partitions of and into a finite number of disjoint subsets, , such that for each between and , the sets and are congruent. Now let be the original ball and be the union of two translated copies of the original ball. Then the proposition means that you can divide the original ball into a certain number of pieces and then rotate and translate these pieces in such a way that the result is the whole set , which contains two copies of . The strong form of the Banach–Tarski paradox is false in dimensions one and two, but Banach and Tarski showed that an analogous statement remains true if countably many subsets are allowed. The difference between the dimensions 1 and 2 on the one hand, and three and higher, on the other hand, is due to the richer structure of the group of the Euclidean motions in the higher dimensions, which is solvable for and contains a free group with two generators for . John von Neumann studied the properties of the group of equivalences that make a paradoxical decomposition possible and introduced the notion of amenable groups. He also found a form of the paradox in the plane which uses area-preserving affine transformations in place of the usual congruences. Tarski proved that amenable groups are precisely those for which no paradoxical decompositions exist. Since only free subgroups are needed in the Banach–Tarski paradox, this led to the long-standing Von Neumann conjecture. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Banach–Tarski paradox」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|