This goes back to an old riddle written by Lewis Carroll of all people (yes, Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll.)
A stick I found,
That weighed two pound.
I sawed it up one day.
In pieces eight,
Of equal weight.
How much did each piece weigh?
(Everyone says 1/4 pound, which is wrong.)In Shylock’s bargain for the flesh was found,
No mention of the blood that flowed around.
So when the stick was sawed in eight,
The sawdust lost diminished from the weight.written by Lewis Carroll of all people
I mean, he was a mathematician and a poet. Is it really that surprising he wrote a poem about math?
One of the pieces is actually 0.33333…4
If you cut perfectly, which is impossible because you won’t count or split atoms (and there is a smallest possible indivisible size). Each slice is a repeating decimal 0.333… or in other words infinitely many 3s. (i don’t know math well that’s just what i remember from somewhere)
Technically no
0.3333… repeats infinitely. The 0.333…4 is not an infinitely repeating number. And since 0.333… is, there’s no room to add that 4 anywhere
Which is why adding them up you get 0.999… which is exactly and completely equal to 1
“just ask me the question” is great all by itself.
If you take into account quantum fluctuations each piece will have a uniquely different mass at any given moment of time.
