On: A Bad Trip to Infinity

[photochemsyn]

The 1977 film Powers of Ten is short and simple but gives one a better feeling for what infinity represents (40 orders of magnitude isn't much in contrast to infinity, but is very large):

https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0

There's also an hour-long talk by Prof. Raymond Flood on Cantor's Infinities on YT that covers all the mathematical history.

[dullcrisp → photochemsyn]

This is a somewhat glib but forty orders of magnitude, being a finite number, has no more to do with infinity that any other finite number. The nature of infinity is that you can’t get meaningfully closer to it.

[mcphage → dullcrisp]

> The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly

> Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.

>

> It wasn't infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting.

> Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is

> incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into

> which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very

> very big, so that it gave the impression of infinity far better than

> infinity itself.

[kmtrowbr → mcphage]

This is from one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. They're with Slartibartfast driving onto the factory floor for creating planets. Slartibartfast, as you recall, is a famous "world designer" who won an award for designing the Fjords of Norway.

[bigbillheck → dullcrisp]

Depends on how you measure, for example what about the stereographic projection of the plane into the sphere and then use the metric in R3? Distance from a point in the plane to infinity is then the distance from where it maps to in the sphere to the north pole.