INFINITY

In our material, measurable world, infinity is never a real, physical quantity; it is only an abstraction. Infinity is an invaluable abstract concept in mathematics, physics, and philosophy. But the important question centers on whether infinity is a quantity, or amount. Amounts are size and distances and counts- and they are represented by numbers. Numbers only have importance relative to other numbers. Infinity, however, ruins all number comparisons. Compared to infinity, every other number is nothing. Some say infinity should not exist in the world we see because it rewrites the rules for mathematics. We have infinity, and every other number would be irrelevant by comparison. From the time when dinosaurs walked the earth to the present feels like an eternity to our imagination, but it pales compared to infinity. The amount of time from this very moment until the Sun burns out over our extinct civilization, until all the stars in the universe slowly disintegrate, is all a micro-second compared to the vastness of infinity. By trying to describe the universe as we observe it, physics does not allow us to experience infinity. In physics or engineering, infinity is the numerical answer that the mechanism of theory suggests when something is impossible or irrelevant. An event that takes an infinitely long to occur never happens. Something at an infinite distance is simply not there. Infinitely small means zero. In an infinite universe everything is in some sense the same, interchangeable, and meaningless.