Harmonic Series (mathematics) - Paradoxes

Paradoxes

The harmonic series is counterintuitive to students first encountering it, because it is a divergent series though the limit of the nth term as n goes to infinity is zero. The divergence of the harmonic series is also the source of some apparent paradoxes. One example of these is the "worm on the rubber band". Suppose that a worm crawls along a 1 metre rubber band and, after each minute, the rubber band is uniformly stretched by an additional 1 metre. If the worm travels 1 centimetre per minute, will the worm ever reach the end of the rubber band? The answer, counterintuitively, is "yes", for after n minutes, the ratio of the distance travelled by the worm to the total length of the rubber band is

Because the series gets arbitrarily large as n becomes larger, eventually this ratio must exceed 1, which implies that the worm reaches the end of the rubber band. The value of n at which this occurs must be extremely large, however, approximately e100, a number exceeding 1040. Although the harmonic series does diverge, it does so very slowly.

Another example is: given a collection of identical dominoes, it is clearly possible to stack them at the edge of a table so that they hang over the edge of the table without falling. The counterintuitive result is that one can stack them in such a way as to make the overhang arbitrarily large, provided there are enough dominoes.