Pardon the drunken philosophy and abbreviated attention to 4 other pages of comments, but :

If we consider that there was a time when man had no concept of Zero, absolute nothing if you will...

Then it is just as logical to assume that there is the inverse.

It is hard to comprehend such a thing, and I believe infinity is entirely subjective.

A billion dollars is an infinite amount of money to me, but to some... well...

True absolutes are something I have trouble with, here are a few examples :

Dot, line, square, cube, what's next?

At some point, somewhere, something reaches 'absolute zero'.... does it spread?

The mind reels...

how many points exist on a line? how many lines exist in a square? how many squares exist in a cube?

I'll take a stab at this one.
2, 4, and 6. Respectively.

How'd I do?

Depends on the parameters, the yardstick if you will...

Very fitting though, as this is an entirely subjective question and could easily be infinite when we consider the dimension of time/space.

Which is normally how people try to explain what comes after a cube. All cubes that will ever be made? All cubes in that string of space?

There is a school of thought that thinks post-cube it would resemble a sponge with infinite other cube 'holes'.

Perplexing to say the least, our minds are not suited for that.

If you are familiar with the coastline anology, then infinity is much more subjective than one would think.

oh, so very close. A for effort!


There's nothing subjective about it. A point takes up nothing, so you can always put infinitely more on a line with definitive length. A line has no width, so you can always put infinitely more on a 2D square. A 2D square has no height, so you can always stack infinitely more of them inside a 3D cube.

The only thing subjective about infinity is for those who don't have a firm grasp of mathematics, which is to say do not have a firm grasp of logic, which is to say lack a completeness in philosophy.

Of course this is infinites in mathmatics. Once you leave mathmatics, whether an infinite anything exists is something you can question.

Well, if you can't travel from one point in time to another -- and you can't -- then it only makes sense that there is no other point to travel to. There is just this point: now, and now, and now, and--

Funny you should mention philosophy, though: the deeper into quantum physics you venture, the more it does begin to sound like philosophy.

Is the line rounded at the ends? - 2
Is the line flat at the ends? - 4

If you stop and start to make it - 4
In one continuous line - 1

As a cube block - 0, because it's a cube not a square.
How many squares make the cube - 6

It's not just that it's something we can question. The problem is that it's not even clear what we're talking about, if we're not talking about infinite sets.

A good example of how something infinite might exist is to look at the amount of bull people can produce from their mouths, its never-ending.

Some is just trying to be clever. While human stupidity might be astronomically huge, it's far from infinite.

Well, my maths may have epically svcked but at least I was right about different sized infinities

(My maths is very, very rusty alas)

This seems very similar to extra spacial dimensions to me. You can mathematically express eight, or ten, or sixteen dimensional objects but you cannot mentally comprehend their appearance or point to any examples of a sixteen dimensional object in the observable 'real' world. The same holds true for an infinity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube.

Actually, Albert Einstein is credited with saying the following: "Only two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe."

Not totally true. There is no one "now." My "now" isn't the same as your "now." If I'm moving through space at a different speed than you are (especially if I'm moving away from you) then our "nows" will diverge further as my movement through space bends my relationship with time relative to yours. We all experience time as a constant stream of "nows," and we agree on a universal "now" as a convenience, but that's not the reality.

Reviving, 'cause I like Softnerd's response.


This is true. People in, for instance, the Himalayas experience time differently than someone in, say, Norway. It's easier to think of time as a fabric that's stretched over everything. That whole fabric is always "now", in the present, though. I think that's a good enough anology...

Good thread.
It will be many years before someone (proffesional) can actually figure out the answer to the OP.
We will have to find out when we die..... or not.