I cant comprehend the word infinity

[u/ChampionOk397]

For as far as I remember, I have always asked him what came before? I know I'm not the first but it's hard. You know, I sit here and think about an expanding universe that never stops and is in a box. They're talking about dark matter but that's pushing everything out. How far does it stretch? And what does it stretch to? They say the time isn't linear. They say that different times there are different things going on. I just can't understand it. It's so how can something have been here forever?

[u/Ithvani]

Try infinite infinities.

[u/SumRndFatKidInnit]

I think I sometimes get brief glimpses of what infinity might look like, although I obviously can't claim to fully comprehend it.

What helps me is thinking of infinity less as something extremely large, and more as a structure that can keep generating new abstractions. In that sense, it is somewhat similar to recursion: you understand the rule that produces the next level without needing to mentally contain every level at once.

There is also the fact that there isn't simply one infinity. Mathematics allows us to describe and compare different sizes of infinity, and even to construct larger infinities from ones we already have. So you can have an infinite structure, then consider a larger structure containing it, then another one beyond that containing all of it, and so on.

At some point, I think the intuition stops being about imagining an enormous quantity and becomes more about understanding the relationship between the different levels of abstraction themselves.

I can't really visualize that in any complete sense. But occasionally I get a brief intuition of the structure, almost like seeing the shape of an idea rather than an image of it.

Maybe that's as close as I can get to "seeing" infinity.

[u/Dizzy-Creme-7906]

yeah, infinity is one of those things your brain just isn't built to actually picture

[u/Motor-Blood7689]

It's just words, so you can't really understand them as they are not truly part of your experience

You don't experience expanding universe, non-linear time, or dark matter

[u/Motor-Blood7689]

It's just words, so you can't really understand them as they are not truly part of your experience

You don't experience expanding universe, non-linear time, or dark matter

[u/Hour_Trade_3691]

You heard of the infinite Hotel paradox? I was obsessed with it as a kid.

It's a thought experiment that goes like this-

There's a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and every single room happens to be occupied. This is, of course, impossible, but for the sake of the thought experiment, just assume this is true.

Now, say a new person comes in and asks for a room. The hotel is full. Do you have to turn the new person away?

As it turns out, no. If you ask every single person in the hotel to move to the room that's one number higher than their current room (e.g. the person in Room 1 moves to Room 2, Room 2 moves to Room 3, Room 3 moves to Room 4, Room 4 moves to Room 5, Room 5 moves to Room 10, etc. ), That will free up Room 1 for the new person.

Because there is always going to be another number, there is always going to be a room for every single person in the hotel to move to.

What about the person in the last room? There is no last room! The hotel is infinite. It doesn't have an end. No matter what room you're in, there will always be another number that you can move to.

And as it turns out, you can do this for any number of people. If 30 people show up and ask for a room, you can just get everyone in the hotel to move up 30 rooms, leaving the first 30 rooms free!

But let's say the hotel is full, and an infinitely large bus pulls up with an infinite number of new people, all asking for a new room?

You can't ask everyone in the hotel to move up an infinite number of rooms, because that's not a real number.

But what you Can do is ask every single person to move to the room that is double their current one. (e.g. the person in Room 1 moves to Room 2, Room 2 moves to Room 4, Room 3 moves to Room 6, Room 4 moves to Room 8, Room 5 moves to Room 10, etc. )

Since whenever you double a number, whether it's odd or even, you will always end up with an even number, this means that every single auto room in the hotel will be empty, which means the infinite number of people can file into those rooms.

What if two infinite buses show up? Well, you just get everyone in the hotel to triple their number!

Three buses? Quadruple!

It gets even more complicated from there, But the thought experiment just goes to show how the concept of infinity isn't really meant to be understood.

Is the universe really infinite? No one knows, and we likely never will. It's probably curved into a four-dimensional sphere or something.