i wrote a final paper on infinity one time for a philosophy class and the weirdest thing i remember is that there are two kinds of infinity called like progressing infinity and actualized infinity and one of them can be dealt with logically but the other destroys any concept it touches
My brain still hurts from learning that there are more rational numbers between 0 and 1 than integers between 0 and infinity, and that was several years ago now
yes, i love that there are the same number of whole numbers as even whole numbers (infinity) but there are more real numbers than either of those (larger cardinality aka more infinity)
oh! and how the idea of the universe being finite is absurd and inconceivable, but also the implications of the universe being infinite are absurd and inconceivable
like the idea that there is always a bigger number makes sense and can be used to draw further rational conclusions but the idea that there just ARE infinity numbers out there, all at once, right now, is logically incoherent and cannot be understood with human intuition
like, i can imagine someone saying "3point1415926--" and going on forever (even though irl i know we all need bathroom breaks) but somehow the idea of walking up to someone and hearing them saying "9-5-1-4-1-decimal point-3... done!" is obviously impossible
The things that we know about the universe with good confidence, is that it's an expanding bubble of spacetime, and our best estimates place the age around 13.4 billion years. How universes form and at what frequency, that's all guesswork. In math, infinity often means the math is broken somewhere.
Are you gonna sell those microscopes again? I really wanted one but it was too expensive for just me - I want to buy one in about 6 years when my daughter is old enough to use it.
ohhhh yeahhhhhh!!!! Microcosmos might be my favorite video series evar! (we look at teeny critters through our own Microcosmos microscope all the time, too :D)
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This is still a great find and I will be watching... at least when that slide is done.
bc if you tried pairing them off, you'd never run out of either
like, i can imagine someone saying "3point1415926--" and going on forever (even though irl i know we all need bathroom breaks) but somehow the idea of walking up to someone and hearing them saying "9-5-1-4-1-decimal point-3... done!" is obviously impossible
This is one of the best channels to ever exist.