(September 20, 2012 at 11:05 pm)Chuck Wrote: Infinite is not a concept that has a tangible equivalent in daily life, so it is hard to think clearly about it without making the mistake of trying to shoehorn a model derived from everyday experience into a situation requiring a mathematically sound model.
So to think clearly about infinity you have to use math to help you. In math, infinity has the property of being arbitrarily divisible, and yet each part would remain just as infinite as the whole.
So 1/2 of infinity, or one trillionth of infinity, or one googleplexeth of a infinity, each party would be different from the whole, but yet no less infinite than the whole. Similarly, duplicate inifinity a googleplex time and the collection of all product from the replication would be different from before, but no more infinite.
This is conceptually how an infinite universe can expand. Put a ruler in space along any direction, and the ruler can go on literally forever. The universe is infinite in that direction. But look at each inch on the ruler. Each inch division on that ruler can grow, until it is now 2 inches long. The ruler still goes on forever. The universe is still infinite. But every portion of it is now twice as large.
Go back to the divide infinity by googleplex concept. What our physics imperfectly descibes as the singularity that spawned everything we can see now may have been part of a larger, perhaps infinitely larger, construct that began an expansion at the time we call the Big Bang.
hmmm...

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