What is infinity? - Printable Version

What is infinity? - Printable Version

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What is infinity? - C C - Feb 26, 2015

http://plus.maths.org/content/what-infinity

EXCERPT: [...] This kind of infinity is what the ancient Greek mathematician Aristotle called a potential infinity: it's definitely there, but you will never actually meet it face-to-face. You just can't get to the end of those never-ending lists or expanses.

Aristotle also thought of another kind of infinity, called an actual infinity. This would be something you could measure, say the temperature of an object, in a particular place and time. Nobody has ever seen such an actual infinity, and indeed Aristotle thought that actual infinities don't exist in the physical world. To this day, physicists don't know whether he was right or wrong....

RE: What is infinity? - Magical Realist - Feb 27, 2015

(Feb 26, 2015 07:40 AM)C C Wrote: http://plus.maths.org/content/what-infinity

EXCERPT: [...] This kind of infinity is what the ancient Greek mathematician Aristotle called a potential infinity: it's definitely there, but you will never actually meet it face-to-face. You just can't get to the end of those never-ending lists or expanses.

Aristotle also thought of another kind of infinity, called an actual infinity. This would be something you could measure, say the temperature of an object, in a particular place and time. Nobody has ever seen such an actual infinity, and indeed Aristotle thought that actual infinities don't exist in the physical world. To this day, physicists don't know whether he was right or wrong....

“...it's very much like your trying to reach infinity. You know that it's there, you just don't know where—but just because you can never reach it doesn't mean that it's not worth looking for.” ― Norton Juster

Your post has led me into a sporadic reflection on infinity for 2 days now. I went thru all the Goodreads quotes about it, but found most of them cliche and inadequate. Imaginings of endless space. Endless time. Endless possibility. What can be said about it? Is it real and visceral, or only abstract and mathematical? I think it is quite real, but is screened out largely by our living in the finite and discrete. The existence of unending beyondness, of an immeasurable magnitude of creative novelty, is both inspiring and despairing. It implies a God, a ceaseless Pleroma of incandescent actualizing energy, but at the same time suggests a boundless and empty void that can never be filled. Such is the nature of death, where we brush up against infinity itself, to either become the former or the latter. In either case beyond all endings lies the infinite state of either pure energetic ongoingness, or eternal absolute nothingness. The profound implication here being that they are simply two sides of the same coin. Two different facets of the same infinitude, as paradoxical as it is beyond all experience.