"To infinity and beyond!" the famous quote by Buzz Lightyear. But there may be a problem with this famous saying. Is there really anything beyond infinity? Is it even possible? What about when you were a little kid and you fought with one of your friends, "I have infinity points!"
"Well, I have infinity plus one points!"
"I have infinity times two points!" But are these possible? What is infinity plus one? Or infinity times two? These questions are hard to contemplate but the definition of infinity, the history of infinity, and the types of infinity may be able to help clear up some confusion.
Infinity is fairly easy to define. It's actually simper than things that terminate, because you have to define where those end. As Rod Pierce puts it, "Infinity is the idea of something that has no end." Nothing like that exists in our own world, so, as Pierce states, we think of it like, "traveling on and on, trying hard to get there but that is not actually infinity." It gives you a headache when you think of it like this, so think more boundless or endless. Even large numbers, such as googol (10 to the 100 power) and googolplex (10 to the 10 to the 100 power), are finite. They're not even close to infinity. However, like finite numbers, infinity is also not growing, it's as big as it is going to get. That is a hard statement to wrap your head around, mainly because, as stated earlier, most people think of infinity as going on and on. There is one upside from these two statements, infinity is not growing and infinity is endless, we can answer the question of infinity plus one, which would still equal infinity, because if infinity is endless and it's not growing, then it would still be endless if you add one. "If there is no reason some...
... middle of paper ...
.... Web.
19 March 2014.
Barrow, John D. "Does Infinity Exist?" Plus Magazine, 2 July 2012. Web. 13 March 2014.
Bogomolny, Alexander. "What is Infinity?" Cut The Knot, n.d. Web. 19 March 2014.
Chu-Caroll, Mark C. "Infinity is NOT a Number." Good Math, Bad Math. Science Blogs, 2 Aug. 2010. Web. 19 March 2014.
Grime, James. "Infinity is bigger than you think." Numberphile. Numberphile. 6 July 2012 Web.
19 March 2014.
"Is There Really Such a Thing as 'Infinity'?" University of Toronto Mathematics Network, 1997. Web. 11 March 2014.
Pierce, Rod. "What is Infinity?" Math is Fun, 3 Feb. 2014. Web. 13 March 2014.
Smith, B. Sidney. "Infinity: You Can't Get There From Here." Platonic Realms Minitexts, 13 March 2014. Web. 19 March 14.
Wolchover, Natalie and Quanta Magazine. "Dispute Over Infinity Divides Mathematicians."
Scientific America, 3 Dec. 2013. Web. 11 March 2014.
In the short story “Where is Here” by Joyce Carol Oats the stranger discusses the idea of infinity. Infinity is an abstract concept that something is without a beginning or ending. The stranger gives three examples of this idea. All three can be represented of a different type of infinity.
Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe. Tr. R. E. Latham. Introduction by John Godwin. Penguin Books, London: 1994.
Nagel, Thomas. 'The Absurd' [in] THE MEANING OF LIFE, [ed.]E. D. Klemke. (Pub. Oxford University Press, New York. 1981.
An underlying theme present throughout the series is the possibility that our existence is not the only one. According to current theories in physics, it is entirely possible that our universe is just one of many universes f...
1. David S. Oderberg, "Traversal of the Infinite, the “Big Bang” and the Kalam Cosmological Argument", Philosophia Christi 4 (2002): 305-36
Hawking, Stephen. Hawking on the Big Bang and Black Holes. Singapore: World Scientific, 1993. Print.
To quote, again, Sir Isaac Newton, "unless acted upon by an unbalanced force, a body at rest, remains at rest". Which means that nothing in existence moves unless it is moved by something else, which in turn must be moved by a previous object, whether alive or not. Once again, if this pattern is taken back to the beginning, there must be a first mover, which is itself not moved. Without this first mover, there will be no further movement. However, if there is nothing powerful enough to move itself, than this sequence will recede into infinity, which is impossible. Thus, there must be a "god", a first mover.
Krauss, Lawrence Maxwell, and Richard Dawkins. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. New York, NY: Free, 2012. 7-8. Print.
We are asked first to comprehend "Infinity," and then to whatever "infinity" "beholds" in not everything but "nothing," and that "nothing" itself to become the building material for "all” (1-2). Identifying the paradox, perhaps, as that which begins the Biblical account of the Creation.
Sweet, William. "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy." Bentham, Jeremy []. N.p., 11 Apr. 2001. Web. 27 Nov. 2013.
It is amazing to see how mathematics has such an influence on the world and the evidence it creates. The world is affected by numbers and mathematics all the time and this mysterious number known as the golden number has proven to be the center of everything.
''Our world is only one of a myriad of worlds that evolve and dissolve in something called the boundless'' (Gaarder, Josetin 34)
It seems that there is no God. For if one of two contraries were infinite, the other would
Prime numbers have been of interest to mathematicians for centuries, and we owe much of our existing knowledge on the subject to thinkers who lived well before the Common Era––such as Euclid who demonstrated that there are infinitely many prime numbers around 300 BCE. Yet, for as long as primes have been an element of the mathematician’s lexicon, many questions about prime numbers remain unreso...