Supertasks and Numeral Systems

摘要

Physical supertasks are completed, infinite sequences of events or interactions that occur within a finite amount of time. Examples thereof have been constructed to show that infinite physical systems may violate conservation laws. It is shown in this paper that this conclusion may be critically sensitive to a selection of numeral system. Weaker numeral systems generate physical reports whose inaccuracy simulates the violation of a conservation law. Stronger numeral systems can confirm this effect by allowing a direct computation of the quantities conserved. The supertasks presented in [2], [4] are used to illustrate this phenomenon from the point of view of the new numeral system introduced in [6].