Infinity

[Arkilogue]

In the universe as we know it the following is true.

Infinity is a just an idea, a concept, it's not real. There is no such thing as infinity, it's simply used to describe things that are difficult to describe in tangible ways.

Which infinity?

An infinite empty space?
An infinite space permeated by a field?
An infinite space permeated by matter?
An infinite line?
An infinite plane?
The infinite travel of a line around in a circle?
The infinite rotation of the surface of a sphere?
The infinite rotational travel of the space within a torus like a wheel of time?

Perhaps the infinite duration of a process through time and this is where infinity begets eternity?
Perhaps the Infinites are the necessity, they all exist simultaneously and we the merry mortals are right smack in the middle of their dance.

Pascal and I would have had some conversations.... https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2001/ben0104.htm


Pascal's Terror
"The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me."
-- Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662

With this memorable sentence, a thoughtful, religious Frenchman saw that the problem of infinity unlocked by modern science was basic. It remains so today.

Most awful of the perspectives opening to the seventeenth century mind was the stillness of the yawning heavens, their moral blankness. There was no music of the spheres.

Blaise Pascal was a Catholic who confronted his own doubts by thinking in terms of the shadow modern science cast over the ebbing theological intellectual landscape of his era. He saw science as a new door to knowledge, one that had to be reconciled with the ancient path of religion.

To Pascal, a man in love with the absolute--whether in his deft calculus of probabilities or in his acute theology--that refusal of the universe to tip its hand, to lend purpose to human action, was terrifying. Though Aristotle had said, "either an outright denial or an outright acknowledgment of the being of the infinite leads to many impossibilities," the ancient world had not earnestly grappled with the implications.