From elementary school, children are taught the concept of infinity. In calculus, learned people use infinity regularly, and "prove" it exists. It does not. Not on earth, not in this solar system, not in this universe. Most assuredly not in the "Multiverse" - a figment of a fertile but very desperate imagination.

1. The universe is only ~10^28 feet in diameter.

2. The Big Bang took place only about 15,000,000,000 years ago.

How finite are those two numbers?

Show me something infinite and I add a million to it.

Hitting STAPLES button: "That was easy."

Prove it doesn't exist.

Betelgeuse wrote:Show me something infinite and I add a million to it.

Perhaps you should learn what 'infinite' actually means, and how the concept is used, in mathematics before making ignorant comments like that.

Is infinity real? - http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post759042.html
Infinity? - http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post397636.html
Actual infinity - http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post864418.html
Infinity - http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post436280.html
A thought on infinity and if it really exists - http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post1098872.html

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twistor59 wrote:About the only useful things that can be uttered about physical infinity are contained here:

Fuck me, this guys an intelectual power-house. I can feel my atheism slipping away...


Praise THE LORD

Betelgeuse wrote:1. The universe is only ~10^28 feet in diameter.

Is it? Where did you get that number?

Betelgeuse wrote:2. The Big Bang took place only about 15,000,000,000 years ago.

If you're using two significant digits, the second should be 4.

Oh boy. A non-mathematician claiming that a mathematical concept isn't real.

Circular reasoning = Infinite.

Paul wrote:

Betelgeuse wrote:Show me something infinite and I add a million to it.

Perhaps you should learn what 'infinite' actually means, and how the concept is used, in mathematics before making ignorant comments like that.

I know precisely how it is used.
Your pretense of intellectual superiority in calling me "ignorant" is typical not only of atheists, but also of liberals who are not atheists.

Moreover, you engaged in an ad hominem attack, which I believe is a violation of the Terms Of Service, not that you care in the slightest, however.

He called your comments "ignorant", not you.

Irony is ironic

I can't wait for the thread on the square root of -1.

I believe in peanut butter!

kennyc wrote:I believe in peanut butter!

Got my EYE on you!

Betelgeuse wrote:

Paul wrote:

Betelgeuse wrote:Show me something infinite and I add a million to it.

Perhaps you should learn what 'infinite' actually means, and how the concept is used, in mathematics before making ignorant comments like that.

I know precisely how it is used.
Your pretense of intellectual superiority in calling me "ignorant" is typical not only of atheists, but also of liberals who are not atheists.

Moreover, you engaged in an ad hominem attack, which I believe is a violation of the Terms Of Service, not that you care in the slightest, however.

Alright, before you start accusing people of ad hominem attacks, be aware that you're committing your own fallacies by generalizing (your several atheist and liberal comments) and also committing ad hominem attacks. "Ad hominem" does not mean "He insulted me!" It means that you were attacking a person's character - which you just did with your comments on atheists/liberals and their "pretense of intellectual superiority" and how similar this poster apparently is to them.

Now, as for infinity, since you're going to keep pushing it, let's take a quick tour of mathematical infinity, as understood by an undergraduate with only a rudimentary understanding of mathematics (i.e. through calculus 3 and differential equations).

First and foremost, keep in mind that mathematical concepts do not need to pertain to a specific precepts - i.e. things that you can hold in your hand. That's why they're concepts, and not precepts. When you enter the realm of mathematics, and indeed when you enter the more in-depth realms of many natural sciences, you stop dealing with precepts and start dealing with abstractions and high level concepts. It is this jump that is most often difficult for laymen the make, and it just so happens that mathematics gets into it rather early with the idea of infinity and infinitesimals.

Infinity does not refer to, and never has, a specific thing that you can perceive. It is a concept. So, here's some places where see this concept at work.

The most accessible example would be "pi", because most people are familiar with it. Pi is the ratio between circumference and diameter of a circle, and it is a transcendental number whose digits go on forever. The length of the digits of pi is "infinite" - it never ends. This is something that exists in the real world: if we had a perfect circle in the real world, the ratio between the circumference and the diameter would always be pi. If we attempted to measure that ratio, the number of digits we would get would keep growing as the precision of our instruments grew.

Through calculus, we use infinitesimals and infinity to perform derivatives and integrals. Does this mean that mathematicians are arguing that infinity is a tangible thing that you can hold? Of course not. Infinity is used as a tool for achieving an end. When I was learning derivatives, we were first taught the concept of limits. Taking the limit of a function at a point is the same as figuring out what that function "approaches" at that point.

So, for example, the limit of y=5x+3 as x approaches 7 is 38. This can be seen on a graph by looking at either side of x = 7. For example, at x = 8, y is 43. At x = 6, y is 33. At x = 6.9, y is 37.5. At x = 7.1, y is 38.5.

What we see here is that as we get infinitely closer to x = 7, y gets infinitely closer to 38. What does that mean? Well, if we used x = 6.99, we'd get a value for y closer to 38. If we used x = 6.999, we'd get a value for y that's even closer to 38, but still not quite 38. Indeed, we could do this out to 6.99...9 for thousands of digits, and still never reach 38. But we would be getting closer with each successive digit. This goes on for infinitely many digits.

We can even take the limit of a function as x approaches infinity. So let's take that same function from before. y = 5x+3.
Well, at x = 9999, y = 49998. At x = 9999999, y = 49999998. So when we take the limit of the function as x approaches infinity, we see that y also approaches infinity - no matter how big x gets, y only keeps getting bigger.

The derivative of a function works using a similar tool. The derivative of a function is actually defined as such:

the limit of the function y = (f(x+h) - f(x))/h as h approaches 0

What this function is doing, in essence, is determining the SLOPE of a line at a specific point - something that's incredibly useful when we don't have straight lines. As you probably know, for straight lines, the slope of a line is the change in y over the change in x, the rise over the run. However, this doesn't give us the full picture on curving lines, and so we have to use derivatives to get a look at what the slope is at any individual point - in fact, derivatives give us a function for finding out the slope of a function at any point.

How do they do this? By looking at the INFINITELY SMALL change in y as an INFINITELY SMALL change in x occurs. Newton and Leibniz referred to these infinitely small changes as infinitesimals. Here's the thing: we can verify this usage of infinity. We know that the derivative of an object's function for position is it's function for velocity, and the derivative thereof is the function for acceleration. We can test such things in the laboratory and verify that the results match the equations, and have done so for hundreds of years now.


As we go higher up in mathematics, the idea of infinity expands. I don't actually know a whole lot after this point in mathematics, but the point here is that infinity is not just something that you can push aside because you can't "see" it. There's a lot of things you can't see, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. Infinity as a concept is useful, and we can see its effects in everything we do. Physics would not exist as it is today without it - and that means that engineering would not exist. Many of today's modern marvels exist entirely because of this understanding of mathematics.

But zero divide by infinity equals one! Therefore zero and infinity are actually conjoined opposites that led to the creation of everything. (Do I mean zero times infinity equals one?)

Clive Durdle wrote:But zero divide by infinity equals one! Therefore zero and infinity are actually conjoined opposites that led to the creation of everything. (Do I mean zero times infinity equals one?)

Not really sure what you're talking about either way man, lol. Anything divided by zero is undefined. Zero times anything is zero.

Betelgeuse wrote:

Paul wrote:

Betelgeuse wrote:Show me something infinite and I add a million to it.

Perhaps you should learn what 'infinite' actually means, and how the concept is used, in mathematics before making ignorant comments like that.

I know precisely how it is used.
Your pretense of intellectual superiority in calling me "ignorant" is typical not only of atheists

He called your statement ignorant, not you.

Betelgeuse wrote:but also of liberals who are not atheists.

What's that got to do with the price of fish?

Betelgeuse wrote:Moreover, you engaged in an ad hominem attack

Eh no he didn't.
People making a statement you don't like =/= ad-hominem.

Betelgeuse wrote:which I believe is a violation of the Terms Of Service, not that you care in the slightest, however.

1. Report him.
2. How do you know? You haven't been here long enough to know whether Paul cares about breaking the FUA.

Thomas Eshuis wrote:2. How do you know? You haven't been here long enough to know whether Paul cares about breaking the FUA.

unless, of course ...