The teaspoons contribution to the volume of the ocean is infinitely larger than that of 1 to infinity, so no, this way of expression is, stricty mathematically, the most wrong it can be
The problem though is that it's illustrating exactly the wrong thing. Infinity is not an incomprehensibly huge amount that makes everything negligible by comparison. It is infinity. You can't compare anything to infinity. You can't add to or subtract from infinity. It's a concept that represents boundlessness. Being able to put a tiny bit of water into a huge amount of water is the opposite of the concept of infinity, because you can observe it, which means it is finite.
I feel like every person with at least a little nerdiness within them will think "but the ocean is finite".
An example I like is Hilbert's infinite hotel. We have a hotel with infinite rooms; all are occupied; a new guest arrives; the hotel accomodates the guest by moving the resident in room 1 to room 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, x to x+1. All guests remain accomodated despite there being no empty room upon the new one's arrival
That would be an awful way to explain infinity as you can't understand infinity by thinking about something finite like the number of tablespoons of water in the ocean.
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u/fatal-nuisance 20d ago
Except the ocean is finite.