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infinity

Robert J. Marks: Some infinities are bigger than others but there’s no biggest one

In Marks’s view, infinity is a beautiful — and provable — theory in math that can’t exist in reality without ludicrous consequences. (Thus the immaterial human mind is capable of creating things that don’t exist in material reality.) Read More ›

Robert J. Marks: 4. How Almost All Numbers Can Encode the Library of Congress

Re math: Almost every number between zero and one, randomly chosen by coin flipping, will at some point contain the binary encoding of the Library of Congress. That’s why infinity is a concept in math but not in the real world. Note: You should ask, how do we come to have concepts that are not part of the real world? Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: 2. Infinity illustrates that the universe has a beginning

The absurdities that an infinite past time would create, while not a definitive mathematical proof, are solid evidence that our universe had a beginning. Read More ›

Robert J. Marks on why there cannot be an infinite number of universes

The Big Bang Theory sitcom’s Sheldon Cooper insists that in no universe would he dance with Penny. That mighrt be true, says Marks but there still isn’t an infinite number of universes: But, some claim, there is an infinite number of universes in the multiverse. That is ludicrous because there are no infinities in the physical world. Even if there were, Cantor’s theory of the infinite shows that, if there were an infinite number of contingencies, not all contingency combinations could be accounted for by an infinite number of universes. Therefore, even if there is an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of contingencies, then—among an infinite number of Sheldons—it’s possible that none of the Sheldons dance. Robert Read More ›

Why the universe cannot logically be infinite in time backwards

For example: The philosophical argument for the universe having a beginning is that past time cannot be infinite because an infinite amount of time cannot already have been exhausted so as to arrive at the present. Infinite time is limitless, inexhaustible, and thus cannot have been exhausted. Read More ›

No Big Bang – Universe Always Was

Thought it all started with a big bang? Well, not so fast. If a new theory turns out to be true, the universe may not have started with a bang. In the new formulation, the universe has never been a singularity, nor an infinitely small and infinitely dense point of matter. In fact, the universe may not have a beginning at all. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once. “The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org. “Our Read More ›