Votorx
02-22-08, 11:46 PM
When most people think of infinity, several different concepts can come to mind such as space, time, numbers, and circles. Its used to explain concepts understood as never ending or forever. This thread is in order to explain a different view of infinity which suggests nothing is actually limitless, but rather that the limit can't be reached.
Imagine a universe which exists inside a bubble and follows the same laws we do. Following the theory of relativity we can assume nothing inside this bubble is able to go faster than the speed of light. Lets also assume this bubble containing the universe is expanding at the speed of light. It would be physically impossible for anything inside the bubble to reach the end of the universe even though the boundary exists.
So technically this universe doesn't exist an infinitely large pocket of space but exists in a limit that can be reached. This is just like the idea of an asymptote in a function, even though the function will always get closer, it'll never actually reach or cross it's limit.
This concept doesn't work as well with numbers. The idea is, no matter what number you have you can always add an extra digit giving you a larger, unique number. At the same time, this number is more complex and requires more effort to conceive. 10 is a much easier number to understand than 182378912738971203721031. In fact, most, if not all people will disregard the latter number due to the fact that, its impossible to understand, it poses no real value, and is completely irrelevant. It serves no purpose.
And with that, 182378912738971203721031 does not really exist. Whenever numbers are used they're used in order to explain real world occurrences. In other words, the number 1, means absolutely nothing. It has no true value until it's assigned one, such as explaining how many apples a person may have left, then the value of 1 will be how many apples there are. When thinking of numbers in this way you can see there really is limit. This limit could be how much energy there is in the universe, but whatever it is it's absolutely the largest value in existence, a value that we, as humans, may never be able to understand, but must accept as real due to our limited understanding of existence.
Imagine a universe which exists inside a bubble and follows the same laws we do. Following the theory of relativity we can assume nothing inside this bubble is able to go faster than the speed of light. Lets also assume this bubble containing the universe is expanding at the speed of light. It would be physically impossible for anything inside the bubble to reach the end of the universe even though the boundary exists.
So technically this universe doesn't exist an infinitely large pocket of space but exists in a limit that can be reached. This is just like the idea of an asymptote in a function, even though the function will always get closer, it'll never actually reach or cross it's limit.
This concept doesn't work as well with numbers. The idea is, no matter what number you have you can always add an extra digit giving you a larger, unique number. At the same time, this number is more complex and requires more effort to conceive. 10 is a much easier number to understand than 182378912738971203721031. In fact, most, if not all people will disregard the latter number due to the fact that, its impossible to understand, it poses no real value, and is completely irrelevant. It serves no purpose.
And with that, 182378912738971203721031 does not really exist. Whenever numbers are used they're used in order to explain real world occurrences. In other words, the number 1, means absolutely nothing. It has no true value until it's assigned one, such as explaining how many apples a person may have left, then the value of 1 will be how many apples there are. When thinking of numbers in this way you can see there really is limit. This limit could be how much energy there is in the universe, but whatever it is it's absolutely the largest value in existence, a value that we, as humans, may never be able to understand, but must accept as real due to our limited understanding of existence.