Saw this one today, and I’m struggling with some of it. For instance, the conclusion that there is proof of infinity simply because we can count sequentially, and not see an end to it. That’s rubbish surely – just because you can’t see the end of something does not mean it doesn’t have an end. It just means your own limitations prevent you from seeing it.
I didn’t much like the constant being told things like Googles, Googleplexes & Graham’s Number are so big we can’t imagine them. I don’t need to be told that – I can’t imagine 1000000 personally, and I’d question if anyone can. Personally I can’t imagine 1000. I might be able to have a rough idea of what 1000 looks like, if I have a point of reference like, say I’ve seen a picture of a crowd of people which was reported to number 1000, then maybe I have a rough idea of what 1000 people look like. Even then, I don’t really have a good visual of that number in my head. If you asked me to point out person number 764, theres no way I can do it and I doubt very many people could. I can cope with, say 10. Show me 10 of something, even for a couple of seconds, and almost right away I will know how many there are, and probably be able to describe number 7 from memory.
Then, the idea that the Universe is not only infinite in size, but that there are an infinite number of infinite universes. This one is surely simply a mathematical construct – it can’t have any real world consquences (other than providing an after dinner conversation topic) since in an inifinite universe, nothing outside it can have any observable consequences on our universe so there’s not a lot of point in them EVEN if they do exist, from the point of view here in our universe.
For me, it seems that the universe, based on my reading, ought to be finite and unbounded. If we’ve got a point of reference for the beginning of the universe, which we seem to have, it makes a nonesense of the idea that the universe might be infinite. Saying it is, when we also say it was once finite in size, is saying that at some point in the last 13.7 billion years ago the universe somehow jumped from a finite to an infinite size. That simply doesn’t make any sense at all. Edwin Hubble managed to show us that the unverse is apparently expanding (which re-enforced the idea of the Big Bang which originally surfaced as a consequence of General Relativity).
My conclusion: infinty does not exist in any meaningful sense. It’s merely an amusing construct for mathematicians to tease us with.
