Can an actual infinity really exist? After all, if the universe is truly infinite in time and space, the idea of God is not needed for its existence. Carl Sagan declared, "The universe is all there was, is and will be."
Let's look at the German mathematician David Hilbert's "Hotel". Imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and each room is occupied. However, a guest arrives and asks the front desk for a room. "No problem!" says the clerk, and he moves guest one into Room 2, guest two into Room 3, and so on to infinity, making Room 1 available for the new guest. Then, an INFINITE amount of guests arrive looking for rooms. "No problem!" says the clerk, and he moves guest one into Room 2, guest two into Room 4, guest three into Room 6, etc., always moving each guest twice the number of their room, making an infinity of rooms available for the infinite number of new guests. Yet, before they arrived, all the rooms were full.
Hilbert's Hotel gets even stranger. Suppose some of the guests start checking out. If all the guests in the even numbered rooms check out, an infinite number of guests leave and an infinite number of guests remain. But, if guests in Rooms 4, 5, 6 and so on leave, the hotel is only left with three filled rooms. In both cases the same number of guests leave, but you are left with different conclusions.
Now, lets see if we can make our heads explode, shall we? Let's consider an infinite regress of events. If time is infinite, then an infinite number of events have taken place before this one. However, before this moment could arrive the moment before it would have had to arrive. And before that moment could arrive, the moment before it had to arrive, and so on to infinity. No moment could ever "arrive", because an infinite number of moments would have to arrive first. But, what if this moment could arrive? Then the question is: Why didn't this moment arrive yesterday, or the day before, since, by then, an infinite number of days would have already passed?
What can we conclude? Nothing is actually infinite; therefore, the universe is not infinite and it had a beginning. And whatever begins to exist has a cause.
"Philosophically, the notion of a beginning to the present order is repugnant to me and I should like to find a genuine loophole.We must allow evolution an infinite amount of time to get started."-Arthur Eddington
"Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang." -Stephen Hawking
4 comments:
this thing is that in our world things have a begining and an end, we have the hardest time wrapping our brains around anything different. That is why some people have a hard time with faith. But they trick themselves to think that big bang isn't a faith. You still have to say to yourself "given such and such, such and such is true." And their digging stops there. I'd think a true big bang thinker would be questioning even the big bang, and there would be no satisfaction for his disbelief. And not assume there are only A and B answers. But that is where it is. We are only Democrats and Republicans, or are we?
To make the assumption that Infinate has an 'end'(i=i), we can make infinaty "i". If the hotel has "i" many rooms, and they are all full, then when the guest arrives, it would be i+1=x (but we only have "i" number of rooms, not "x"). If "i" more of guests arrive, we added it to the present "i", i+i=2i. If all the even roomed guests leave (i/2=.5i), You are left with half of "i", not "i". Lastly, if all the guests left except 3 (i-3=y), then "y" number of guests leave not "i".
Patrick & Mary-Frances:
You can't have infinity plus one; if you could add to infinity, it wouldn't be infinite. Also, being left with "half of "i" " (infinity), still leaves you with an infinite number.
Sorry for being unclear, I ment that if we assume that "infinaty" was an actual number, like 10 or 100. Then if you add one to it, it would become a new number, like 11 or 101. thus no longer being "infinate" or "i".
To me infinity is all inclusize, everything. Nothing left. Thus if someone else showed up to be added, or an a seeminly infinate number of people showed, then the orignial "infinate" wasn't infact infinate as it wasn't "full". Just my two cents.
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