Lately I’ve been going through (yet another) phase where I’ve been fascinated by two concepts: nothing and infinity.

These are concepts the human mind can comprehend, but not accurately picture in our minds. Nothing is, of course, a very simple concept. It’s tempting to say that nothing is 0 of everything, but that’s not really the case – as 0 of everything means you have something to compare with, something to count. Something is not nothing. Empty space is not nothing. We can understand the concept, but not visualize it – naturally…

Infinity is a fantastic concept. In math it’s common to refer to infinity, for instance: from 0 to infinity - meaning all possible positive numbers. That’s a whole lot of numbers! And yet, it’s still an infinitely limited definition of infinity. That’s because you can’t actually put infinity on a linear structure.

(Well, we just like to ignore that and do it anyway, because many times it’s practical to do so. That means using the light version of infinity…)

If you take all the possible positive numbers, then add all possible negative numbers you have infinity squared, right? Um… No. Infinity is an absolute constant. It can’t be multiplied by anything. You can’t have infinity + 1. If you were to do that then you didn’t really have infinity to begin with. Consider the following childish “argument”:

Person1: “Yes” to infinity!
Person2: “No” one more time than your “Yes”!

In the above case Person2 would be out of the game before he/she got started, because Person1 would have reserved all available answers. Person2 could use the light version instead and say “No, to infinity”, but he/she still wouldn’t win the “argument” because Person1 would always lead the never-ending race.

It’s fun to contemplate various logical consequences of nothing and infinity. It’s quite possible to write beautiful poetry about, which I’m not going to attempt – I’m no poet. However, one of the most famous quotes of all time can be applied to this subject, and it sums it up quite nicely:

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

Popularity: 6% [?]

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Religion & Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.