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| Posted By: Keith Mayes Posted On: Mar 29, 2009 Views: 104 | RE: Is anything real, infinite |
| Posted By: Charles Matthew Posted On: Mar 29, 2009 Views: 100 | RE: Is anything real, infinite After studying a bit of topology and getting deeper into my computer science curriculum, I've come to believe that the universe we experience is merely one element in an infinite set, and every element in that set is itself infinite. For our universe to be finite, it would mean that there must be an end of time at some point, because time itself is a dimension. Yet, there really is no discernible beginning that we have managed to discover. I don't find it likely that we will discover the "beginning" of time, since the very notion of beginning requires time to exist. Can something have an "end" if it doesn't have a beginning? Also, I believe it could make sense to speak of an expanding infinity, if one confines the notion of expansion to a relative sense. Mathematically, some abstractions "approach" infinity "faster" than others (this is a source of many headaches in upper-level calculus), and since our universe doesn't appear to be more than a mathematical abstraction (an operator space topology, to be precise), this notion may not be as absurd as it seems. It seems to me that the only way to describe reality is as a large pattern of information. Does information require some medium in which to reside? Is our universe running inside some Pentium 10^100th processor? If our own reality is nothing but information, then clearly information itself is a medium enough for storing patterns. With that in mind, it seems inevitable that there must be an infinite number of universes, simply by virtue of the fact that it would be possible to represent an infinite number of states with either binary or analogue information. Those universes exist in the "design space" of possible universes. They may not be "tangible" to us, but the fact that they COULD be represented, means that they exist in at least a limited fashion. But who's to say that it's a "limited" fashion, considering that our own universe appears to be nothing more than a representation of information patterns? According to quantum physicists like Michio Kaku, time appears to be a circular river with an infinite radius, and lots of little branching tributaries. Whatever that means. . . |
| Posted By: ZX9 Posted On: Mar 30, 2009 Views: 94 | RE: Is anything real, infinite THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!! Finally, someone mathematically explains my reasoning!!! Thank you so much. As an 11 year old, I have a mathematical disadvantage, so thank you again. I think that, like I said before, you may need to rethink many of your posts Keith. |
| Posted By: Keith Mayes Posted On: Mar 31, 2009 Views: 89 | RE: Is anything real, infinite |
| Posted By: ZX9 Posted On: Mar 31, 2009 Views: 86 | RE: Is anything real, infinite No, he did not prove my point. But it is reinforced. Forgive me for my "daft remarks" once again. Who doesn't understand that(I presume me)? I am here to disprove that, although according to other posts, you give up arguing! Besides once again you use my age (a huge mistake giving it up) against me! Thanks, but you haven't shown your proff, once again either. Perhaps I do need to "wise up" some. But surely I am at the least giving (or getting this time) evidence. |
| Posted By: Charles Matthew Posted On: Mar 31, 2009 Views: 86 | RE: RE: Is anything real, infinite Here's a lengthy argument/hypothesis for ya! Note: I'm not claiming that this "is" how things are, but how things "might" be. It's what, so far, makes the most sense to me personally. -------------------------------- Creation is an event, and an event occurs at a moment in time--by definition. How is it that the Big Bang could have "created" time if time must exist in order for things to "happen"? We say "created" but I think that's a misconception. I think it makes more sense to imagine the universe as a function that can have different values of "t" plugged in--except that "t" itself is a function as well. You, I, and the universe that we currently live in, are the output of the universe function, given the evaluations of "t" that prevail "at the moment." Now, I put "at the moment" in scare quotes because it's the same trap we fall into when we use the word "created." It's really a pain to explain this idea, because the very language that we use to describe reality (mathematics aside) is saturated with naive assumptions about the nature of time. What does it really mean for us to exist "at this moment"? Here's where the infinite set theory comes in. If we look at the "universe" as being an infinite set of states, then every moment in time contains a separate universe whose quantifiable state is defined in terms of that moment alone. But, that being the case, it is impossible to know with certainty what will "occur" either prior to or after that moment, because there are an infinite number of possible paths to "reach" the current moment, and an infinite number of branches from it. All of these universes exist in parallel, static and unchanging (all infinity of them). In the very "moments" that we THINK about the universe, we 'happen' to exist in a universe where we have thought precisely those thoughts in precisely that way. There are an infinite number of "you's" reading this right "now," and each one of them believes that he or she exists in a universe that changes from moment to moment. They believe that they turned on the computer before browsing to this page, but that's because the ones who think this just happen to exist in a universe where their mental state is organized in precisely that way. We are not "travelers" through time, we are simply patterns of information that happen to occupy a similar domain in the infinite set. It's a bit like a movie, where each frame is a different universe--except that there are infinitely many frames, and they have no linear sequence. We identify our position in time through our memories. If we had no memories, we would have no way to judge the "passage" of time. You exist in a universe where your memories are as you think they are. If you're lucky enough to exist in one of infinitely many universes where the representation inside your head corresponds closely to the actual "state" of the universe in which you happen to hold that representation, then it could be said that you actually "know" something about YOUR reality. We could even go further to say, that of the infinitely tiny subset of universes that actually contain "YOU", certain features are more or less common. But none of this is discrete. There are many variations of "you." There is a gradient of universes bounding the one that contains "YOU" as you think of yourself in this moment, and a high percentage of them also happen to be universes that look as though they "began" with a Big Bang--though of course, not a single ONE of them actually "began" in the first place. This is true for all entities in the "universe." Perhaps it should be called a "multiverse," since it is more akin to an infinite ocean of universes. Some are universes where YOU exist and have certain memories and certain thoughts. Some universes have a "physical" "space" that is trillions of lightyears in length/area/volume/whatever, whereas in others it is only fractions of a lightyear. We exist in a universe where we believe that all time and space were once infinitely small (i.e. nonexistent)--but we don't LIVE in a universe where that is true. The Big Bang is happening "right now," and will always be happening "right now"--in the infinite number of universes where it happens at all!(which is not THIS one, and never was) We think that our "laws" of physics set constraints on the possible outcomes and beginnings of the "Big Bang." We are 100% correct to think this in exactly ONE universe. That is, if you think of the universe as an infinite set of states, where each state is it's own island universe given a particular output in a particular range of the time function (re-read that and focus on the words "output" and "range"--it's crucial to the point), then we can trace exactly one "shortest path" from our current universe to any other universe in the set. This is because by imposing such a constraint, we have reduced the states of our universe to a one-dimensional set, like the set of all real numbers. Yet, reality does not appear to function in a manner that could be predicted by Laplace's demon. After all, quantum fluctuations appear to be utterly random. Thus, the universe that we inhabit probably belongs to a set defined by a non-linear range of time. That is, our coordinates in the time dimension are probably defined by a multivariate function that behaves very differently from the way in which we commonly perceive the "flow" of time. With this perspective, the very question of whether infinity exists seems almost absurd. Why? Because "quantity" depends on a notion of space and time, and both space and time are concepts that depend on a dynamic universe--a universe where one may travel from point A to point B in a certain "amount" of time. Take 1 universe out of the infinite set, and you have 0% of reality. Take an infinite number of universes from the infinite set, and you have an undefined % of reality. 1/Infinity = 0. Infinity/Infinity = undefined. Except, in calculus if you are discussing the output of functions, you can know (approximately) what one function over another evaluates to. That is, you can define it in terms of bounds. X^2 over X^3 is 0 as X approaches infinity. Both of them are infinite, but one grows infinitely "faster" than the other. Take X^4 over X^3 -- this evaluates to infinity because X^4 grows infinitely faster than X^3. So if we ask the question: "Is the universe infinite?" then the answer really depends on what subset out of the possible universes we're referring to. If we're referring to all universes "like ours" then we're referring to a subset of universes that is infinitely smaller than the whole (but is also itself infinite), and that's true no matter where you draw the bounds of "likeness." It's like taking X^4 universes out of X^Infinity universes. It will always evaluate to 0%. You get exactly 100% if and ONLY IF the order and coefficients of both terms grow equally fast as X approaches infinity. So if we want to ask about reality at large, we must broaden our set to include ALL POSSIBLE universes, and that set naturally contains universes that are completely unlike our own, and/or utterly beyond our ability to imagine. Indeed, that itself could be a characteristic used to define the bounds of a set--The set of all universes that are impossible for any living human being to imagine. So to sum up: Infinity is a term that only applies to mathematics. Yet, given the apparently patterned behavior of our universe, this has led many to speculate that reality actually IS mathematics. Indeed, there is no comprehensible alternative theory on the horizon. We may not (and probably never will) have access to a complete knowledge of the "universe function" (being a part of it ourselves), but we can probably define functions that produce analogous evaluations, given specific bounds on the "time" domain. To that end, infinity would be as "real" in "reality" as it is in mathematics. There are algorithms in nature everywhere, and they can be described with mathematics. Little did we know, that for all these hundreds of years, what we have actually been describing is, itself, a description. Like a story told second-hand by a wide-eyed child, the recounting grows more inspiring with each new step toward maturity. |
| Posted By: frankiefuthark Posted On: Mar 31, 2009 Views: 80 | RE: RE: Is anything real, infinite |
| Posted By: ZX9 Posted On: Apr 1, 2009 Views: 71 | RE: Is anything real, infinite Once again, thank you Charles Matthew, and I can totally agree with you. I am grateful for your expression of how there was no Big Bang. It makes sense. I believe that in that complex paragraph, you say or mean to say that time is infinite because for the Big Bang to exist there must have been time(Meaning the Big Bang doesn't exist because it "starts time" in some opinions, others there is a bigger bang; the same applies). Proving infinite real! Ok Keith, perhaps there is something obviously incorrect in my summary of the paragraph, but it is nice to someone else on my side(or at least someone elses information to ponder). I don't know if that's precisely what you meant to infer, but that is what I took. |
| Posted By: ZX9 Posted On: Apr 1, 2009 Views: 70 | RE: RE: Is anything real, infinite Forgive me, the end is addressed to Charles. |
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