How can inifinity exist?
- Thread starter kwerk
- Start date
It's not infinity it's a loop! Stop thinking about numbers and think of a fractal. Now imagine that instead of making copies of itself it makes unique new structures from new shapes. That would be real infinity. No matter where you move or zoom to, you find something new which could not have been generated by a using a function on an existing part. Although I suspect there would still be a function at work, but using randomness. But nobody can prove randomness exists, so how can infinity exist?
Soldato
- Joined
- 12 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 11,788
- Location
- Somewhere
Your arguments don't make any sense.
Also, the kind of fractal you talk about is called a quasi-self-similar fractal, an example of which is the Mandelbrot set. It has nothing to do with randomness.
Really, you're just making things up. You seem to think you're outwitting whole generations of mathematicians with your arguments
Associate
- Joined
- 30 Sep 2010
- Posts
- 1,130
- Location
- London
If infinity means that all possibilities exist within it - because if they did not then it would not be infinite - then it follows that infinity must also encompass the reality that infinity does not exist. Discuss !
Your arguments don't make any sense.
Also, the kind of fractal you talk about is called a quasi-self-similar fractal, an example of which is the Mandelbrot set. It has nothing to do with randomness.
Really, you're just making things up. You seem to think you're outwitting whole generations of mathematicians with your arguments
It's still self similar. It's like saying a computer can generate a random number, but really it can't. It can only generate a fake random number from some algorithm.
The truth is that we will never know. Science and Maths are just tools we use to understand the world we live in and the majority of them are just THEORIES. Its just like in death when some one dies of "natural causes". What exactly is that...?
We do not have the brain power to commute or imagine what really is going on and we never will in the same way we can not bring back the dead.
We do not have the brain power to commute or imagine what really is going on and we never will in the same way we can not bring back the dead.
Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Jun 2004
- Posts
- 3,691
Infinite has no beginning or end and as such can have no middle, which in turn means it can't be segmented, it just is. Infinite can't have a number other than 0.
+1 for the corrections to my statement
and
+1 for a join date older than mine with a lower post count
There's nothing wrong with the "layman" trying to make sense of complicated maths/science, in fact it's a good thing that the general public have a decent qualitative knowledge of difficult concepts. But when the armchair mathematicians come out of the woodwork and claim accepted theory to be incorrect because they can't understand it, well that's a bit crazy.
kwerk: I hope you don't mind me asking but to what level have you studied maths?
kwerk: I hope you don't mind me asking but to what level have you studied maths?
Soldato
- Joined
- 12 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 11,788
- Location
- Somewhere
Well then what on earth do you mean? What are you even trying to say? If you want an infinitely long sequence of symbols that follow no pattern, then how about the digits of pi, e, or any other transcendental number?
What you're saying is so hopelessly vague and ill-defined as to be meaningless.
Last edited:
Pie and e are just numbers. Just like mavity is a number. Thats all they are!
Why people try to figure pie out to the nth number is beyond me! What purpose does it serve?
mavity is a 'Force', not a number.
Just a couple of uni classes which were of no interest to me at the time. It's not so much maths I'm talking about but infinity in general, like when people say a black hole has infinite mavity for example, or there are infinite universes.
Watching the Horizon video that someone posted there seems to be a few scientists who were saying what I was thinking about.
I understand the math CONCEPT and I accept that it's a useful way to represent uncomprehendingly big numbers, but what I'm saying is there's no evidence that it EXISTS in real terms and I can't come up with a way it could possibly exist without simply looping something finite.
And the monkey typewriter thing bugs me too. Because for that to work the monkey would have to bash keys completely randomly, but there is no such thing as true randomness so eventually it would settle in to a pattern no? The closet thing science has found to randomness is things like the decay of radioactive material but nobody can really say if that is truly random or not.
Might have been mentioned already, but I thought a cool visualisation was that of two concentric circles, with a line drawn from the centre point to each of the "infinite" number of points on the inner circle's perimeter. Now extend those lines so that they touch the outer circle's perimeter. Damn, visible gaps.
Soldato
- Joined
- 12 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 11,788
- Location
- Somewhere
mavity's not a number. Perhaps you're referring to the gravitational constant?
Well, quite. High precision may be needed for some applications, but beyond that it's pointless.
Soldato
- Joined
- 12 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 11,788
- Location
- Somewhere
Black holes don't have infinite mavity! A black hole is just an object whose Schwarzschild radius is larger than its physical radius.
Well, the number 10 doesn't exist does it? You can't go out there and find it. You can find something that it represents (e.g. a row of 10 cars), but you can't find the number 10. It seems to me as though you're looking for a similar manifestation of infinity. You're not going to find it, though, as infinity is a limit, not a number. It describes the tendency of a quantity to become extremely large.
Well Bell's theorem essentially disproves the notion that radioactive decay is governed deterministically by local hidden variables.