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> and thats totally fine because the real world does not contain infinities Anyone who positively claims that infinities do or do not exist in nature don’t kno
by wyager 9y ago
> and thats totally fine because the real world does not contain infinities
Anyone who positively claims that infinities do or do not exist in nature don’t know what they’re talking about.
Physics is full of infinities. They show up all the time in relativity (gravitational singularities) and quantum physics (renormalization, rigged Hilbert spaces with integration over infinite distributions).
For some of these infinities (like the ones we have to deal with in quantum mechanics), it’s unclear (to me, at least) whether or not they have any sort of “real” equivalent. For things like gravitational singularities, our current theories predict the physical existence of infinite quantities (density, gravitational field, etc.).
- yequalsx 9y agoInfinities show up in currently used models to describe physical processes. Is there an actual infinite quantity in nature? I’m a mathematician and not a physicist but it always seemed to me that the answer is no.
- Chris2048 9y agoWouldn't you need infinite precision to test empirically?
- azag0 9y agoBut it's also very obvious that general relativity can only be an effective theory that fails for very strong fields. No one I know actually thinks there are singularities, those just point to places where GR starts to significantly deviate from reality. Navier–Stokes equations are very accurate on macroscopic scale, but regardless of their mathematical properties, there are no actual blow ups in real world, because ultimately, the liquid is composed from atoms. Likewise, the fields in GR must be ultimately quantized in some way, which will almost certainly break the singularities. The infinities in QFT are really just a hack. I mean, all those calculations are perturbational in the first place, so they can be hardly considered a "true" picture of reality.