Math of infinity

if you want to infer you are screwed up, its your choice haha. i think that your line of questioning is good, thats why i bothered to respond. trying to reconcile the ultimate differences between our logic and our intuition/emotion is the key to all of life, in my opinion. non duality is the philosophy that allows it.

Yet it's done and as I understand it the present majority favors the single event ending in dismal ballooning accelerating dispersion forever

Mine can but as I intimate, it's pretty primitive

If we can speculate it as a kind of nothingness--zero diameter but infinite mss etc-- then we can assert it has zero duration, thereby comprising only a point in the infinite flow of time. Yes I know, it's full of all sorts of contradiction and paradox. But as to whether it's a "normal point"…..

. Yes I know Car, it's full of all sorts of contradiction and paradox. Do you suppose that "something beyond" to be God

To the contrary Car, it's my understand that it almost has to be finite. Otherwise how can we have a Big Bang or a Big Crunch

Maybe it's because I'm just not smart enough but this doesn't make sense to me. I can easily posit (though not view in minds' eye) a growing or shrinking mass constituting all there is or can be, again with nothing outside 'cause there simply isn't any outside

In my apparent ignorance I still see nothing whatever paradoxical or contradictory in my position--though the idea of an eventual near rep is still troublesome in this scenario

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Again, at some risk of repetition, once more, revisiting, I see no need for "other dimensions"

I had tried to explain above, apparently unsuccessfully, that your concept of my position owed to my misuse of the term "universes". Describing a single infinite Universe I should instead have said something like, ..."large collections of matter nearly identical. In the present case for instance everything visible but too far away to see"; the most gross possible violation of Occam's Razor, a very argument for its finitude

Yes I've heard such repeatedly from all directions; but for what it's worth (not much hereabout), I reject it as another candidate for Occam

However again, still, revisiting, forgive any repetition, the suggestion of my OP was that maybe our mathematical construct in the field of infinity is flawed: Notwithstanding Bangs and Crushes, this is even assuming it to be infinite, owing to our limited understanding of infinity, no two such "visible collections" are even remotely similar

…..a suggestion nobody has yet attempted to address

Readily conceding to the probability, last eve I dug out my "The Whole Schebang"m by Ferris, intending eventually to approach our subject on a more nearly rational basis. About 2034 I'll be better able to entertain your postings

Thank you Car, and in turn I consider your postings entirely rational and deserving of better response than that of which I'm capable in my old age with incipient Alz's

It's interesting Car you should so assert as it's been my contention from Day one that one of the major problems in threads of this sort is the duality of our language, unfortunately a necessary for everyday communication but a definite limitation altogether

Part of the problem might be a subliminal assumption that the Bang and Crunch take place in an infinite void of some kind. But the implication of "void" is space and so this perception of It All has to be modified because of course all the space that exists is in our unit that's supposedly expanding or contracting

(…acknowledging we can't separate space, time, and matter as discreet dualistic (tripartite? trimerous? trilistic?) entities. At the end of the Big Crunch Occam would seem to suggest the whole thing is squeezed down into a substance of uniform consistency)

Reason for what I see as a misperception of course, is the impossibility of imagining a unit of finite size without also seeing a void that's supposed to be "outside" it. So course it's more in Occam's favor to entirely deny the "void," to assert simply that there is no "outside"

Hence my assertion that given a Bang or Crunch we hafta be finite

this is only because we have a finite amount of time to look at, and extrapolate from. to us, it seems everything is expanding, and only random theories suggest it will ever stop, so let us just assume it will keep going infinitely.

this is the only problem with infinite. mathematically it is sound, but when you try and look at reality and say, oh well we have billions of years of evidence, let us just assume it will keep going to infinite...THAT is where the inaccuracy arises, in my opinion.



no, it can't, that is just the same as me, trying to imagine nothingness, and then something appearing in it, and of course, it seems to happen at a certain point in time, in imagination.

but, what i meant by the mind can't conceive it is that what we experience as 'mind' is a stream of thoughts, appearing sequentially in time. the experience of mind is already a product of the existence of space/time. so whatever you try and conceive with your mind, it cannot possibly be an understanding of the lack of existence of time, because a 'mind' would have to be non-existent also if time were non-existent.

see, time being non existent simply means eternal time. that is all it can mean. if a certain time period is finite, then you can call it time. if it is infinite, it is beyond time now, time doesn't exist anymore.


again, my point above is relevant. if you accept infinite time, then time doesn't exist anymore. if you have an infinite field, then there is no possibility of a 'point' in that field being localised. you can only localise it with reference to another finite part of the field, but you cannot properly localise it with reference to the entire field, if the field is indeed infinite.

similarly, the big bang point represents the entirety of all possible existence, eternal time, infinite space, infinite mass.

no. it seems to be finite according to what we have observed of it, but again as i said there is no hard evidence to prove it is not infinite. and again, if you accept my theory that the big bang point represents the entirety of potential existence, then it is certainly not a normal, single point in time, it is the eternal background of eternal time.

there is no need to suppose this. god is another word, if we choose to define it as the ultimate thing, then yes, we can define it like that. or we can just call it ultimate reality, or ultimate truth, or 'nothingness/everythingness'. all these are just words, pointing to something beyond what we can imagine.


you say you can posit this, but your logic doesn't seem to follow it. if the shrinking mass is truly all there is or can be, and there is nothing outside it. now if it completely disappears. so now there is no more shrinking mass. and there is also no 'outside it', as you say you can easily posit. and yet, you still maintain that time would be going on in this scenario still, because you decide that if another 'repeat big bang' happened, you label it as a repeat, happening as another event in time.

again, we can all use words like nothingness, timeless, eternal, blah blah, but when i said the mind can't conceive it, i just mean these things are beyond what the mind is itself.


there is no maths which suggests that 2 visible collections of matter should be near identical due to chance, because the finite time scales we are able to observe are far too small.

now, in infinite time there would be infinite repeats and near repeats. but none of these repeats are happening in the same 'space'. because a single time line itself has infinite space. for example, if you take one particle, and give it infinite time, and the particle is moving, then you are guaranteed to use up infinite space also. therefore, repeat big bang's/universes can never happen within the same dimension.

i know you want to just imagine it all in one dimension, and its fine to do so, but it is not mathematically sound, in my opinion. i know it sounds like i am just using 'other dimensions' to explain it all away, but i'm not, i'm saying if you really look at the maths and science, you cannot say we have evidence to say that a repeat big bang and universe is possible within this space time continuum. therefore, if not possible, it is another dimension we are talking about.

Yes, no, Car, I can't conceive if that means "experiencing" as in the mind's eye. But I can "posit" it

Here's where we can't agree. Whether or when we're around to sense its flow, time is a very real objective presence, running faster or slower depending on the state of diffusion or contraction

Sorry Car but I'm still totally in the dark here. If there's a Bang or a Crunch (still somewhat soft evidence I hafta admit) that's the best we have showing it hasta be finite. How can anything changing size or mass be infinite

Again, I was being facetious. Indeed I can't see it disappearing altogether, supposing instead it shrinks to, say, the size of a marble before the next Big Bang

I didn't say they were. I was positing not different "spaces" occurring in the same "spot" but a "single" infinite Universe full of collections of matter etc like the one we can see (recalling however its unlikelihood is the very reason I can't believe in it)

Part of our problem is one of language

Again, still, at risk of repetition, once more, revisiting, Occam says no

But Car we're at an impasse so we should quit, at least til we hear from somebody else who understands this stuff better than we

….or at least than me

Before you give up on me, Car, a technicality: Ferris makes reference to eg, "the first microsecond" of the Big Bang. Due to its mass, however, one microsecond must represent billions of today's years and so wonder if you've entertained this apparent discrepancy and how you've resolved it

I'd hoped we might enlist a few others but evidently they consider us, or me anyway, a hopeless case. In any event a pleasure chatting with you

Unless of course the critical moment of Bang-Crush is an object of infinite mass, in which case its time presumably would stop. Speculation about that moment gets get really chancy

I del with the other end of infinity in geophysics. We try, by xpansion to calculate a distance or area (Its like taking one half of the length of your last step toward the wall, you never reach the wall but you can accurately approximate your distance traveled)

Yea Man I've wondered about that very possibility, in that last millimicronanosecond of the Crunch before the next Big Bang whether the rules change, that an object with infinite mass might have zero diameter

As long as you've joined us however, Car has intimated that a universe of changing size could nonetheless be infinite and because it sounds contradictory I'm wondering if you could clarify this prop to the satisfaction of an Average Clod (me)

its infinite in the math of motion if you, the observer are unable to "catch up" with its rate of expansion. Fortunately light IS NOT infinite. Weve measured its velocity in space and on earth.

Aha now I see what Car has meant

I'm quite aware of all that. I was merely suggesting a new way of looking at time-at-a-distance to easily satisfy intuitive requirements to explain relativistic changes in the moving object

Even if I'm 'way off base for some reason I was hoping either (1) that someone might explain why my weird approach wrong or (2) agrees that in some curious, inscrutable way I might have a handle on sumpthin' formerly overlooked

everyone looks at infinity in their own manner and who are we to criticize what works. I think of infinity in math terms of the number ONE, divided by ZERO. Itll blow your mind in its simplicity of a concept.

If the universe is finite in space and time, then where is it and what is beyond it?

Not, you perhaps have not adequately perused the foregoing. Given a finite Universe the phrase "where is it" is meaningless, while there's nothing beyond it, there simply is no beyond

Nonsense. Proving a negative is harder than you acknowledge. It would be better to say that one cannot, from any point within the observable universe, observe anything outside it. That is true because light in our universe does not escape its bounds.

That does not prove that there is no beyond or "outside" or other universe.

You obviously haven't read up on modern mathematics. If you had, most of your problems would've cleared up by now.

I've proven nothing, merely speculating that there doesn't have to be an infinite void, that there aren't any contradictions in the notion that there's no "outside"

Yea, admitted

Okay Ding; so how does it apply

Yes, no, I was hoping however somebody else hereabout better at this sort of thing has done so. Returning to the OP, Ding, paraphrasing my original conjecture, I wonder, if the Universe is infinite and if the rules everywhere else are pretty much the same, whether there might be another solar system like this one; or indeed an infinite number so nearly identical as to be indistinguishable

Being a q entailing the math of large numbers, I can't ever recall having encountered even an approach to the notion