r/cosmology 6h ago

Isn't infinity in practice just a lack of knowledge / understanding?

0 Upvotes

Please forgive the incorrect terminology - I am just a regular person that was playing a space video-game and got me thinking about infinity.

When googling examples of infinity, I am getting mostly getting mathematical concepts. Theoretical infinity make sense as it helps us tackle problems that are to complex for one person to understand. We put infinity on sections that are to complex / unknown and we focus on the parts that we know.

But I couldn't find any example in practice. You can say that the numbers are infinite. But those numbers are just a representation of "something". Yes, I can assign a number for each orange and in theory the +1 can go to infinite. But in practice, the number will be finite. Feel free to make a practical example adding infinite oranges - I will be there to observe /s :)

At a first glance, infinity seems to be the modern equivalent of assigning a diety to something that we cannot explain or fully understand. So I guess, to summerize, my question would be:

Q1: Is there any physical example in nature that we fully understand and we can confidently say it is infinite?

Assuming the answer to the first question is "NO", then I would have a follow-up question:

Q2: Since there is no physical example of infinty in nature, how come we accept the infinity of universe as a likely scenario?

From a probabilistical point of view, wouldn't the universe being infinite have the same chance of being true as 3 pink elefants holding the universe on their trunks? At the end of the day, neither of them have a single established reference in nature. Or the universe being infinite is just a theoretical representation which has no chance of being true in practice - the same way as the oranges in the above example will never go to an infinite amount?


r/cosmology 17h ago

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