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"You are a Wilderness Guardian. That northern wasteland; that land of blood, desolation and death is your dominion. Tonight we are going home." ~His Lordship |
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Posted: January 21, 2010 06:03 am  | |||
      IRC Nickname: Matt|Multi Group: Emeritus Posts: 668 Member No.: 49 Joined: December 30, 2007 Total Events Attended: 12    |
That's one way you might could put it I guess. -------------------- Born at sea, baptized in blood your fame will never die. Your Division is one of the best if not the best division in the history of American arms -Gen George S Patton on the 45th Infantry Division  | ||
Posted: January 21, 2010 07:59 am | |||
 IRC Nickname: Dnovelta Group: Emeritus Posts: 2750 Member No.: 130 Joined: January 20, 2008 Total Events Attended: 137 | Just out of curiosity, is there a "point" at which something "becomes" infinite? I mean, I know it's not as simple as reaching some "big" number and then adding 1 to it makes it "infinite" but at what point is something able to be labelled infinite? If we SAY something is infinite, what it "really" means is that we're not "sure"? To say that something is infinite, means we know that it doesn't end, but wouldn't that entail a constant search for an end that doesn't exist (an end we don't REALLY know doesn't exist?). Meh, I'm just building off this concept I was taught in my philosophy class, about how the human mind knows an infinite amount of things, things that we never even think about but we "know". It was interesting because at first people are obviously thinking in terms of education and how we don't "know" the answers to all questions on a test, but then we were all easily convinced otherwise by the simple example of our teacher holding out his hand and asking us how many bottles of Coca-Cola he was holding (none). But that not did we only know he had zero bottles, we KNEW he had less than 1, and less than 2, and so forth. And going on with that, we could apply that to every other type of bottle, and then onto other objects, and even incements of objects like less than 1g of a substance, less than 1.1g of a substance. It's all really fascinating. --------------------   | ||
Posted: January 21, 2010 02:19 pm | |||
 IRC Nickname: Sgtswordfish Group: Guest Posts: 1737 Member No.: 1758 Joined: March 9, 2009 Total Events Attended: 64 | well, we do know that where there is a beginning there also is an end or a moment in which it seizes to exist. with infinite though it was more of a continuation although it makes sense especially with PI. its an interesting complex equation in which numbers do not follow suit an order or algorythm. a continuation of an unknown syntax or just us being lazy bumbs... this is mind bogglin?? --------------------  Goals 2011  | ||
Posted: January 21, 2010 06:32 pm | |||
 IRC Nickname: Wayne|Eregion2 Group: Emeritus Posts: 3087 Member No.: 156 Joined: January 25, 2008 Total Events Attended: 8 |
Kind of goes back to the part where you can't derive an infinite quantity from purely finite quantities no matter what you do. The concept of infinity is tricky to work with; the way Cantor approached it was to hypothetically take the absolutely largest finite number in existence, therefore the next number must be infinite. That got denoted by Aleph-Zero, it's in the first tier of infinite numbers. Now, what we THINK Cantor proved is that if you take 2^(aleph-zero) you'll get a number in the next infinite cardinality (an aleph-one). This has to do with the number of subsets a set has: a set with three elements ({1, 2, 3} or {a, b, c}) will have 2^3 subsets. So if you go from a set to the set of all its subsets in this circumstance you'll go from a set with a cardinality of 3 to a set with a cardinality of 8. What hung Cantor up though is he's not sure if there's Aleph quantities -inbetween- Aleph-zero and 2^(Aleph-zero), so we're not sure if you can call the result Aleph-one or not. And if I understand it right, this isn't a way of really -arriving- at higher degrees of infinity more than understanding the relationships between them. 2^(aleph n-1) = aleph n (where n-1 and n are subscripts) is known as the continuum hypothesis, and nobody's really been able to make much headway on it since they proved it's totally unique to the rest of our mathematics. So we have to catch up to it a bit.  --------------------  | ||
Posted: January 22, 2010 12:35 am | |||
| IRC Nickname: Matt|Multi Group: Emeritus Posts: 668 Member No.: 49 Joined: December 30, 2007 Total Events Attended: 12 |
Think of an asymptote on a graph. Where ever the graph goes asymptotal at, say x=3, the line will continually approach 3, but never actually get to it. Ever. Another way to look at this is from the perspective of speed. As you approach the speed of light, weird things start to happen. If you could theoretically surpass this speed, you would end up having infinite mass, which is just plain ridiculous. So in short, no, there really isn't a way as far as we know to advance from finite to infinity. Infinity really isn't even a number, but a concept. The idea of something continuing forever. Not even time is infinite, it had a beginning, and it will have an end. Nothing outside of mathematics is infinite. -------------------- Born at sea, baptized in blood your fame will never die. Your Division is one of the best if not the best division in the history of American arms -Gen George S Patton on the 45th Infantry Division | ||
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