1y ago

🔔 SHAME 🔔

37 comments

"A number is how far along you are on your journey, infinity is the horizon you journey towards." - Some guy I met in a pub
- was that guy Socrates or perhaps Einstein
  
  No, it was a philosophy PhD student on his 2nd bottle of tequila apparently.
I believe there's an absolute infinity.
- Meh. Everything that can happen, does happen.
- I also believe that
Infinity is a concept that we made up for the purpose of explaining some math. Prove me wrong.
- Infinity. Checkmate.
  
  Infinity plus 1.
- I dunno about proving you wrong, but the fact that you can comfortably say there is no largest natural number is kind of a belief in infinity
  
  That seems more like an engine limitation than proof of infinity, to me anyway.
Which theory is the most plausible?
- IMO? That infinity is just a concept to occupy professional thinkers that breaks every construct wherein it's applied.
  
  Where and how does it end? Both infinity and non-infinity seem strange to me.
- I'm not sure anyone has really provided a complete explanation of what is the difference between working with an absolute infinity and the way we do math normally in science and such.
  Basically, no one has found the idea of using an absolute infinity to explain the world to be better than the way we deal with infinity in college courses. In college, you run across the idea that some infinite sets are larger than others (countable numbers vs uncountable). Edit - I think you could have the idea of different sized infinities and a final largest absolute infinity. It’s just that this concept isn’t useful. It would be like claiming God is purple. Nobody can prove you wrong and it doesn’t matter.
  Of course, an infinite set makes sense in math, and has practical uses in the sciences, but nothing can truly be demonstrated to be unending. Another poster put it nicely - infinity is a direction, not a destination.
  I recommend this video How to count past infinity by Vsauce (about 20 minutes long). It is closer to entertainment than a lecture but its pretty good. I'm only an undergrad math major but I haven't found any real problems with this video (though, he does start talking about ordinal numbers which aren't terribly useful to anyone that I know of, yet, except for some really complicated number theory stuff cryptographers might use, don't ask me. cryptographers are basically wizards imho).
- The question doesn't make sense, there are many things which have an infinite quality (like infinite cardinality) or are called infinite/infinity (like infinite cardinals and ordinals). They're not contradictory. They coexist the same as all finite things do.
- There is currently no way to observe any of this empirically, so the question is pretty much moot. It's speculation either way.
Explain?
- Might be this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Infinite
  Or this is about some people thinking infinity is just a really big number, with which you can do calculations like e.g. (these are non-sensical!):
  ∞ - ∞ = 0
  2*∞ > ∞
  
  these are non-sensical
  Transfinite algebra is a widely-accepted aspect of mathematics.
  
  I mean, the Casimir effect was initially derived as the result of two infinite values having a finite difference.
  
  Bonkers
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I misread that as "absolute immunity" and thought you had posted to the wrong community.
The meme works just as well, "absolute immunity" is just more topical and political than mathematical

37 comments