Thursday, March 6, 2008

Infinity?

What is Infinity? It's a question that we learn about when we take calculus or when we talk about physics or spirituality but what is infinity? I had been listening to a radio show and on it one of the hosts defined infinity as something that is not finite, but that only really tell you what infinity isn't not what infinity is, and one interesting example they gave was that if you were to change the question and ask what is green? Then by the same notion from the previous answer you can say that green is not blue, well that tells you what green isn't but it doesn't tell you what green is, we can define green or rather any color, as what our eyes perceive through the reflection of light on an object, depending on the type of material or color that object is bounced off of, how much of the light gets absorbed and how much gets reflected... that forms the color that we perceive, so that is a definition of the color green. But back to the question of infinity, what is it?? Well according to the mathematician Cantor he stated that a collection is infinite if some of it's parts are as big as the whole. That you can find a 1-1 mapping of parts of a set to another set, so take for example the idea of walking to the door but you start by going half way then going half way from your current point and so on, in this way there are infinite possibilities but there is a final goal. A better understanding if your read the "Infinite Hotel". But Cantor also stated that all infinities are not the same, so 2 * infinity is not the same as 3 * infinity. Now to speak a little bit outside of set theory, people consider the universe to be infinite, or that time is infinite, and on a spiritual sense, god is infinite, in that god has infinite wisdom and that god is incomprehensible since god is infinite, but if we take that notion and we can find and can define what infinite is then the idea of god no longer exists because understanding God is supposed to be outside of the scope of our understanding, the supreme being, if we now understand or know what infinity is then we understand god, and if we understand god then god is something we can all understand and thus god really doesn't exist because we all understand the infinite and thus understand god. So infinity is a concept of set theory, but there are still quite a number of paradox's that need to be explored and this is quite an interesting concept and definately worth exploring more, but I will leave it here for now.

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