What’s the deal with infinity?

After reading those quotes you might be asking yourself “how can all of those be true simultaneously?” Your next thought might be “what does this have to do with infinity….?”

In order to visualize this a simple mental exercise is helpful.

Imagine that you have left your body and are looking down at yourself. Then you move a little bit farther and farther to a point where you see yourself sitting wherever you are. Then farther so that you see your house and then even farther to the point where even hour house looks like a tiny dot. Keep going farther so you start to see the city you live in then farther so you can see the continent and at this point the city looks like even a tiny dot. Keep going so you can see all of earth, then farther and you can see all the planets in the solar system. Keep going farther and farther so you can now see the entire milky way galaxy. Then farther and you can see superclusters and more clusters . Then start to go back, slowly passing back by the super clusters and back through the milky way, back in into your solar system and back to earth and eventually back into your body.

Ok, if you made it this far you deserve an award.

Now try the opposite. Go inside yourself. Imagine that you have left your body again and are flying towards yourself. As you get closer you get bigger and bigger, and slowly you start to see your body is made up of literally trillions of cells. As you approach one of these cells you start to realize it is actually made up of trillions of atoms so you approach the atoms and see that it is made up of protons and neutrons and then those protons and neutrons are made up of subatomic particles and smaller particles and smaller particles.

Unfortunately, most modern day physicists didn’t do enough self-reflection or meditation. Because if they understood this concept they wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on particle accelerators trying to find smaller and smaller particles just to put their names on them. They would soon realize that if they built larger and larger accelerators they would find smaller and smaller particles forever.

To summarize: there are at least two kinds of infinity – infinitely large and infinitely small. Infinitely small is the best visualized with division, both in nature and mathematics.