Skip to main content
Login
  1. Home
  2. Beyond Popular Science
  3. 3. An Axiom of Your Choice
Open Book Publishers

An Axiom of Your Choice

  • David H. Silver(author)
Chapter of: Beyond Popular Science
  • Export Metadata
  • Metadata
  • Locations
  • Contributors

Export Metadata

Metadata
Title An Axiom of Your Choice
ContributorDavid H. Silver(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0526.03
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.03
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightDavid H. Silver
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2026-04-08
Long abstract

The Banach–Tarski paradox shows that a solid sphere can be partitioned into finitely many disjoint pieces and, using only rigid motions, reassembled into two spheres identical to the original. This construction depends on the Axiom of Choice and the existence of non-measurable sets, whose behavior diverges from intuitions about volume. While not physically realizable, the result reveals how certain set-theoretic assumptions allow decompositions that defy standard notions of size and conservation.

Print length10 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
THEMA
  • PH
  • PHQ
  • PHR
  • PDZ
BISAC
  • SCI055000
  • SCI015000
  • SCI057000
  • SCI061000
  • SCI075000
  • SCI034000
Keywords
  • Scientific storytelling
  • Conceptual physics
  • Modern physics explained
  • Relativity and quantum mechanics
  • Mathematics in science
  • Deep science for general readers
Locations
Landing PageFull text URLPlatform
PDFhttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.03Landing pagehttps://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0526.03.pdfFull text URL
Contributors

David H. Silver

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3071-304X

David H. Silver is an industrial researcher whose career bridges computer vision, computational biology, and science communication. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biology at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology as a Rothschild Scholar, and was awarded a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for his doctoral work in computational biology at Cambridge, UK. Silver’s peer-reviewed publications span multiple domains: computational biology in Nature and PNAS; computer vision systems in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; medical AI in Human Reproduction and MIDL; and entertainment analysis in PLoS One. He holds over a dozen patents in depth sensing, medical imaging, and generative AI. His industry positions include Algorithm Engineer at Intel Corporation, ML Researcher at Apple, and CTO/co-founder roles at several technology startups. Silver maintains academic collaborations with researchers worldwide and serves as a peer reviewer for Image and Vision Computing and PNAS.

Export Metadata

UK registered social enterprise and Community Interest Company (CIC).

Company registration 14549556

Metadata

  • By book
  • By publisher
  • GraphQL API
  • Export API

Resources

  • Downloads
  • Videos
  • Merch
  • Presentations
  • Service status

Contact

  • Email
  • Bluesky
  • Mastodon
  • Github

Copyright © 2026 Thoth Open Metadata. Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.