Concept of infinity?

[theklng]

put it this way: there is an infinite distance between any two numbers in abstraction.

 

[Ace of Spades]

If I had infinite time to do the task of making two lines of the exact same length, here's what would happen. I would get bored, say "Fuck this" and do something else. That is invariably what would happen in any case unless you found a really obsessed person.

 

[edinflames]

I was really bored today, and I started thinking about the whole concept of time and stuff. So for example, lets take the concept of time. Some say that the concept of time has extended forever back, and will go on forever as well. So on a seperate note, let's say that I drew a line, and told you to draw a line exactly as long as the one I just drew. You could get as close as you want, but I could keep saying that you were 0.1 mm off, then 0.01 mm, and keep going on and adding zeros no matter how close you got. However, If you have infinite time to do this task, what would happen? It's sorta like infinite time to complete infinite scenarios I guess. I may have worded this in a real crap way, but if you understand what I'm trying to say, kinda makes you think... I think

Its this kind of thinking that reminds us all that we are really just intelligent apes, our brains are not designed (evolutionary speaking) to handle the concept of infinity.

here's another pointless question: how many people had to die before we figured out which mushrooms where poisonous?

I quess you cant define it since foolish people still eat poisonous mushrooms by accident

Or on purpose, the psychoactive psilocybin mushrooms advocated by Terrence McKenna are essentially a special kind of (relatively) non-lethal poison.

 

[Specter_]

put it this way: there is an infinite distance between any two numbers in abstraction.

No. The distance is finite. The possible numbers are infinite.

 

[Anarchemitis]

Space is the hole that we're in. Being completely scientifically accurate, space battles true to all factors would actually be really boring.

 

[theklng]

put it this way: there is an infinite distance between any two numbers in abstraction.

No. The distance is finite. The possible numbers are infinite.

i deliberately didn't say between two points in a graph or anything in that regard. i meant the distance between any two numbers is infinite.

 

[ChaosTheory3133]

[link]http://www.break.com/usercontent/2006/12/The-Tenth-Dimension-201705.html[/link]

 

[Turtleboy1017]

Okay, this was a bad example. I wasn't wanting a mathematical thread, and I really didn't want it to turn into that 0.999=1 thing or something. I meant if infinities did exist, say... I told you to go to the end of a wall that never ended, but I gave you infinite time to do it. Theoreticly (or scientificly) what would happen? Sorta...

 

[peduncle]

here's another pointless question: how many people had to die before we figured out which mushrooms where poisonous?

lol, i wonder that to.

i don't like the concept of infinity except when it's referring to a non terminating decimal.

 

[acer840]

Well, how many numbers are in between 0 and 10?

Spoiler: Answer

There are Infinate numbers between 0 and 10. We put numbers to represent different scales and items and are thus man-made. So there is no true concept of infinity. We use it to specify we cbf finding the end.

 

[Mrsoupcup]

who care creation and the big bang and god and all that stuff are so complex its better just to play portal or somthing rather than worry about stuff that doesn't really affect us. (good question though, never seen it before)

 

[OuroborosChoked]

I, too, have been thinking about the concept of infinity recently. It seems to me that nothing can be truly infinite, since this is a finite universe. The closest we can come to the infinite is a hypothetical infinite, since the true measure of infinity is immesurable. That is to say, if you claimed that a particular string was infinite, there's no way you could know that for sure since it would be infinitely long and thus would require infinite time to measure it. The best you could reasonably do is estimate that its length is infinite. This is of course setting aside the fact that the universe is finite. This point is naturally indisputable, since we know that the universe began at a finite point in the past. There is no starting point for infinity, so the true concept of infinity can never be known, only guessed at or estimated... so in all practical, finite human experience, infinity = nearly infinity.

I guess that means a finite universe rounds up?

here's another pointless question: how many people had to die before we figured out which mushrooms where poisonous?

Enough people, as long as it's WE who are eating the non-poisonous ones, and not them. ;P

 

[mooncalf]

Even so, ponder on! *raises mug*

You mean "What happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object?"
Being willing to struggle with a conundrum is enough, it demonstrates/exercises a will towards understanding

I was really bored today, and I started thinking about the whole concept of time and stuff.

Try Zeno's Paradoxes [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_Paradox], in particular the Dichotomy Paradox is what your example vaguely resembles.

It is dangerous to confuse a time with a timeline, a timeline being a thing of limited dimensions formulated to express only portions of something entirely different. I don't pretend to understand time, I just assume that it isn't linear.

 

[Bolverk]

Watch this. [http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HvgwR9ERCBo]
Eat cake.
[/thread]

A very small part of me hates you right now. It may be small, but it hates you alot. I think I can feel my brain trickling out of my ears.

On topic, this is one of those things that I would love to understand even a portion of it, but my tiny little brain can't comprehend it. Maybe if I whack myself over the head with something hard enough and unlock part of my brain that I don't knowingly use...

 

[Chaz D]

Time is not infinite, since time and space are inextricably linked. Neither can exist without beginning or end, and both exist purely within the bounds of limitation. The big bang most likely spewed everything out into the universe, including time.

Except Everything can't come from nothing. There is no beginning or end to the universe, there are ideas but not a beginning or end. It's just human's can't really wrap their minds around that concept.

We don't yet know whether something can come from nothing or not. Our knowledge of the Universe is nowhere near to understanding such a thing yet. In either case, the big bang is not nothing, nor was the singularity that it erupted from. We do not yet know what existed before the big bang, so it is meaningless to speculate without evidence. But there is certainly no evidence to suggest that time and space have always existed or are infinite in any way.

 

[Calax]

I guess it's all a POV thing, To us humans, Geological time and Astronomical time are like infinites, yes they are defined but we don't see their beginnings and endings within one lifespan (usually).

My point mainly is that Humans cannot conceptualize properly the concepts of Nothing, and Infinite. We can define them perfectly but we cannot really experiance them and thus know little about how they really work. Nothing in particular.

 

[Gavmando]

Time was created when Everything split itself into more than one thing. For everything to be more than one thing, there must have been a space between Everything, which would have meant that the space would have taken time to traverse. As the space would have been a distance that would have been measurable, with time, to cross.

Also. Time as we know it is an illusion. It was created by the human mind to give us a point of reference.
And, there is no past nor future, there is only now. The past moment no longer exists and the future can never exist. Everything we know and everything that exists, exists right now in this moment.
Which is basically the principal behind enlightenment. To exist completely within this moment. This moment is unmeasurable as it has no beginning or end, it simply is.

 

[Maze1125]

put it this way: there is an infinite distance between any two numbers in abstraction.

No. The distance is finite. The possible numbers are infinite.

i deliberately didn't say between two points in a graph or anything in that regard. i meant the distance between any two numbers is infinite.

And you are wrong.
The distance between two finite real numbers a and b with a > b is a - b, using the standard definition of distance (and you'd be hard pressed to find a definition of distance that made the distance between two finite numbers infinite).

Just because you can fit an infinite number of numbers into a finite distance, does not make the distance infinite.

 

[Maze1125]

Also. Time as we know it is an illusion. It was created by the human mind to give us a point of reference.

Relativity, and a hundred experiments backing-up Relativity, would disagree with you.

 

[Inverse Skies]

The problem is size. Always has been. You can keep on zooming into the line you've drawn until you find that the line is not actually solid, but a series of mis-jointed graphite smudges, and zooming in on those reveals atoms and zooming in them eventually means the distance between them becomes aeons, gulfs which would seem infinite or impassable to anything that small. Going the other way, getting bigger, eventually you would hit the (theoretical) edge of the universe, but what if you kept on going? What then? Size is the problem here. We can't define the infinite as there is no reference point. Mathematics (sorry I know we're trying to avoid this) always tells us that certain equations (ie ln(x)) can approach its infinite asymptote but never reach it, using similar and sound logic the two lines could never be the same length.
Time is also an abstract concept, created by carbon- based lifeforms to measure their inevitable decay. Scary when you think about it like that.
I can't believe I joined just to post on this topic, but it IS interesting