Yeshu

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Buzzby

Infinity is a well-defined concept in mathematics and is used widely in higher math. While the concept may be poorly understood by non-mathematicians, I can't see any circumstances under which a non-mathematician would "compute infinity".

[Why did you put your post in a tiny, almost-unreadable font?]

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Hashishi

The universe is also conventionally thought to be finite and unbounded.

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youareloveninja

every thought is infinity, if the universe is infinite, then all parts are also infinite, because infinity divided by any number, even itself, is infinity
so even something very finite, does it really end? if it is there, it is there how long is a moment
?

Yeshu

I'm not claiming I have the math skills of a professional mathematician or anything but I am technically very skilled in mathematics. I use infinity all the time but that isn't the point. Identifying the limit as x approaches infinity is entirely different from really using infinity. In fact the infinity typically gets canceled out or reduced to zero (eg, have the limit as x approaches infinity of (x^3+2x^2-4)/(x^2+5x), you would go through and divide all terms by x^3. When you plug in infinity the x^3 becomes 1. The term 5x gets reduced to 5/x^2, which will become almost zero with infinity plugged in for x. ) I just feel like infinity gets used like a variable that represents a real number when it really does not. There is no three- dimensional expression of infinity squared, so we shouldn't use it in math problems. When you say infinity is well defined, I think it is more we have defined infinity as a variable so we can do math problems. That little symbol can do very little when actually expressing infinity.
The only reason I think this is important is because one day computers will completely surpass our mental skills (in more ways than just logic puzzles) and we will need to take note of the difference between our infinity and true infinity. It's not like we can check to be sure a number is really infinite, but...

Yeah sorry about the font in the origional post. For some reason I thought I was typing in a different font and size from normal and kept changing it around, apparently I failed to pick the right one.

Desperado

The explanation in these videos could be a reason why People think the universe in infinite

The fact that we cannot see everything could lead us to the, perhaps false, explanation that the universe is infinite.

http://www.marijuana.com/science/128...ml#post1166385

Video's posted by Yana Usdi.

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Yana Usdi

Nahh, not for me at least. That would be enough to suspect that it could be, but not that it is. In the past I always accepted the same thing most of us depended on, the curved universe idea. It could be larger than we can see but still be curved.

Where we can start to suspect that it is infinite rather than that it could be comes from other sources, Buzzby and I talked about it in the thread "Universal Theory" a little bit. I've never bothered to track down the details but I've heard a bit about a test they did some time back which is mentioned in the following playlist.

The Universe - Parallel Universes

At about 1:50 or so through 4:00 in the second video it mentions the test I refer to. It's when I hear people like Michio Kaku reduced to suggesting that it "might" still be curved but just so slightly that we can't see it that I start to actually suspect it could be infinite. Still just a could be, but it's looking pretty big in any case. Lots bigger than we used to think. Since this keeps coming up in this forum maybe I'll try to track more down on that test.

Edit to add this.
Ok, I'll look more later but a quick 10 minutes browse finds the following. There are three main ways the universe could have developed depending on matter density. "positively" curved like the surface of a ball and finite in extent; it can be "negatively" curved like a saddle and infinite in extent; or it can be "flat" and infinite in extent according to a page on the subject by NASA. This page explains WMAP Big Bang concepts and this page touches on the results of the test they did.

According to that we used to know the universe was flat to within about 15% accuracy but most still assumed a curve, now we know it's flat to within a 2% margin of error. I'll see if I can find more on it later. The Big Bang concepts page notes that One of the key scientific questions in cosmology today is: what is the average density of matter in our universe? While the answer is not yet known for certain, it appears to be tantalizingly close to the critical density. While that doesn't offer any certainty of an infinite universe those who are sure it's curved seem to be more sure of it than NASA is these days.

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Yeshu

This is very informative and interesting.

kronik

Pur Motherfucker!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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kronik

oh my god lmao sorry wrong post O.O