I can recommend "Calculus: Basic Concepts for High Schools" by the same author (L.V. Tarasov) to anybody unfamiliar with calculus: https://archive.org/details/TarasovCalculus/page/n1/mode/2up. It's written as a dialogue between author and reader.
His book on school physics also use the dialogue approach:
Questions and Answers in School Physics (Dialogues between students and teacher)
https://archive.org/details/questions-and-answers-in-school-...
While other two books use dialogues intermittently as in the probability book
Basics Concepts of Quantum Mechanics
https://archive.org/details/tarasov-basic-concepts-of-quantu...
This Amazingly Symmetrical World
https://archive.org/details/TarasovThisAmazinglySymmetricalW...
(I am the curator/maintainer of the mirtitles.org blog and the typesetter of the books)
> This completely digital version typeset in using TEX with EB Garamond font by DAMITR MAZANAV damitr@proton.me
> Released on the web by http://mirtitles.org in 2023.
> Access the BTEX project files http://gitlab.com/mirtitles/twibop
There is a point where all of you will finally come to appreciate the limits of rationalism and materialism and let go a bit more.
Calculus put a man on the moon and a camera next to Pluto.
Can it love?
> Calculus put a man on the moon and a camera next to Pluto.
I am not saying the illusion is not useful, but all the things that come out of it are also inside the illusion.
What if Pluto is not as far away as we actually think it is?
Distance is a human concept. The moment we stop thinking distance does not exist. It may be a limitation that we perceive distance as something to be overcome through rocket ships and not through other methods.
Time is also in the same category. If you want to read a good book on the topic read “the end of Time quote by Jason Barbour.
What if, what if.. um.. nothing, really? Our ships continue to work for a while, (may be t=0), then they won't, and we correct the models or the math.
The idea of distance being a human construct is not a new idea and may be the underpinnings of spooky action at a distance.
I think the OP's point is that much like the Newtonian physics that paired with calculus to put a man on the moon, calculus is a pragmatically magnificent tool that doesn't yield exactly correct or perfectly accurate answers for many questions. Just "enough accuracy for the problem you're solving," in some very real senses.
What you are calling an exact result is only a limit function. All “things” will measure infinitely.
we only stop because it’s convenient to stop. But that doesn’t make the size of anything have any specific size other than where we stop measuring it.
What you're saying is in the practical real world we can never measure things exactly. That's true but that's not what I got from calculus. Irrational numbers come to mind (not calculus).
I come to almost the opposite conclusion as you. It is amazing that we can solve equations in spite of infinities.