4 ms·
The casual use of the word "infinity" is a tell tale sign of a lack of rigor. People think of infinity as just an incredibly large value, but Cantor and others
by waynecochran 4y ago
The casual use of the word "infinity" is a tell tale sign of a lack of rigor. People think of infinity as just an incredibly large value, but Cantor and others have shown is more. Just take aleph-naught infinity -- the "smallest" infinity. I could count every particle in the universe and square it a million times and you are nowhere near any bound to aleph-naught infinity. Then jump up the aleph-one and now you are dealing with uncountable sets -- far "denser" that the simple countably infinite sets. Of course you can keep going to aleph-n for you favorite n. There are no actual infinities in terms of something measurable in the universe -- only potential infinities -- things that you can add on to indefinitely -- but you never reach any actual infinite quantity of anything. You can't even truly divide space an infinite numbers of times -- you will eventually reach the Planck length were anything smaller does not make any real sense in terms of actual existence.