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Do you believe that there is something out there that's infinite? I don't, because I can't believe that there's something that’s amount couldn't be displayed with numbers. There should be an infinite amount of power/energy to produce something so it would be "somewhat" infinite. Even then, it can’t be infinite, as the source of power/energy isn't finite.

Confusion

asked Nov 12 '10 at 17:01

Mihkel's gravatar image

Mihkel
4.6k4158114

edited Nov 13 '10 at 07:26


first off i fixed up the post so it is somewhat legible.

secondly, infinity is more of a concept of something being really huge for all practical sakes it could continue on forever... example if an ant wanted to walk to the moon, to the ant the moon would be an infinite distance away.

it also comes up in repetition when you do something and infinite amount of times that basically means you will never stop.

the other example is infinitely small which comes up in calculus a lot, you take very small increments to find how fast some thing is changing or taking very small samples of a curve and finding the area under each sample and adding them up to get the area under the whole curve.

here is a question... how many ways can you cut a circle in half? how many even slices can you cut a circle?

how many real numbers are between 1 and 1.01... you can keep cutting in down to a smaller amount, and such we can say there are an infinite amount of numbers between 1 and 1.01.

Zeno's Paradox... for an arrow to travel from the archer to the target, it must first travel half the distance, but before that it must travel half of that, and half of that, pretty soon you get 1/2,1/4,1/8,1/16... soon you are at 0 and the arrow will never leave the archer... but the target will say otherwise. however if you add all the factional components up, you get the number 1 (btw, there are an infinite amount of fractional components)...

so infinity is really a tool to look at things really large, or really small. however other questions are out there... how far is the universe in diameter? well we haven't found the end so to our knowledge it goes on forever...

answered Nov 12 '10 at 18:07

trueb's gravatar image

trueb
15.4k53104260

edited Nov 12 '10 at 18:08

Yes, it all depends in which way you look at it. If the ant would be immortal he would still finally reach his destination no matter how far it is, but for the ant it's still infinite. On the mathematical level "infinity" is far more something else. Yes I know that you can slice a circle in half infinite amount of times. There's so many ways of looking at it and what to believe.

(Nov 13 '10 at 07:25) Mihkel Mihkel's gravatar image
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Asked: Nov 12 '10 at 17:01

Seen: 765 times

Last updated: Nov 13 '10 at 07:26