It's good to see so many scientific oriented minds congregating here at otc. It sounds like many of you fall on the math part of the spectrum of things where i tend to lean on the side of theory. I'd like to have your thoughts on this subject. Here's where i think math falls short in explaining our universe. You have two objects in space that are moving towards one another. Eventually they will collide as these objects meet. Now if we must for this discussion to avoid getting sidetracked we can pretend these objects are 'needles' and that they have finite points. Now imagine these objects are moving toward one another. At some point in the real world they must meet or collide. Yet math tells us that this is impossile as distance is infinite in both directions. According to mathmatics you can infinitely cut the distance between the two objects in half in which case they will never meet. Regardless of how small the distance is between them it can always be cut in half. Yet in the real world we can easily clap our hands even in an ether, and out hands will stop. This is but one example.
Good question. My answer (and there are those who won't agree) is that many people use infinite as shorthand for some number too large to conveniently write down. I don't think the universe is infinite, but it is very large. You're right about the mathematics. There are new branches I'm not familiar with, but we haven't yet found or invented mathematics to describe the universe completely. This does not mean it can't be described, just that we don't know how yet. The two points is something we went through in college (calculus? I'm not sure I remember). I think the only place that could happen (the needles never meeting) would be the event horizon of a black hole. It does illustrate quite well the limitations of mathematics.
You are talking about the dicotomy (sp??) principle that an ancient philosopher proposed.
Yes, according to math the principle is valid, thou, it only states that the number of points between two points are infinite, not that it is impossible to take the trip through all those points.
That'd be like trying to manually add zeros to get 1, because When x tends to infinite then 1/x tends to zero
As chcr said, infinite is used to express very large numbers (beyond our imagination), just as 0 is used to express extremely small numbers.
*waits for someone to jump on my throat for saying that
It does illustrate quite well the limitations of mathematics.
