(November 25, 2010 at 2:03 pm)Chuck Wrote: What is the reason for doubting the infinity of the size of the universe?
I personally doubt that the universe is infinate in size because nothing in nature, to my knowledge, is mathmatically infinate and I don't see a reason as to why the universe is to be an exception.
From my limited understanding, there are also a number of problems with this mathmatically as well (infinities in equations that represent reality are usually ruled out) but that line of reasoning comes from reading physics books that I read years and years ago, so I may not be remembering this precisely.
I also view the fact that the universe is expanding to be evidence that the universe is not infinate in scope, because logically something infinate in size has nothing to expand into.
Finally, I don't see much of a reason why the universe can't simply be enormous.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
