"The Indefatigable Frog" is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in the July 1953 edition of ''

Fantastic Story Magazine ''Fantastic Story Quarterly ''was a pulp science fiction magazine, published from 1950 to 1955 by Best Books, a subsidiary imprint of Standard Magazines, based in Kokomo, Indiana. The name was changed with the Summer 1951 issue to ''Fantastic St ...

'', and later in ''

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick ''The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick'' is a collection of 118 science fiction stories by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was first published by Underwood-Miller in 1987 as a five volume set. See Philip K. Dick bibliography for informatio ...

''. It has since been republished several times, including in '' Beyond Lies the Wub'' in 1988. The story centers around two college professors, Hardy and Grote, who argue about one of

Zeno's Paradoxes Zeno's paradoxes are a set of philosophical problems generally thought to have been devised by Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (c. 490–430 BC) to support Parmenides' doctrine that contrary to the evidence of one's senses, the belief in plural ...

, called The dichotomy paradox, where a frog wants to get up from a well, but each jump is half of the previous one. That way, Hardy argues, the frog will never exit the well, while Grote argues the opposite: that the frog will eventually escape from the well. The Dean of the college wants to settle this age-old paradox and instructs the two professors to create an experiment with the frog. Hardy and Grote do exactly that: they send the frog down a large tube and subject it to an energy field which reduces the size of the frog in half for each leap. The frog eventually becomes so small that it disappears. Grote goes into the tube to figure out what happened, while Hardy flicks on the switch, forcing Grote down the tube. Grote is halved in size as he progresses, and the smooth floor of the tube eventually becomes huge rocks and boulders as he nears microscopic size. Grote disappears, and Hardy claims that the frog never made it across and that he was right. In the end, Grote -- and the frog -- became so small that they passed through the molecules of the tube, away from the field and back to their original size.

External links

* Short stories by Philip K. Dick 1953 short stories Works originally published in Fantastic Story Quarterly {{1950s-sf-story-stub