• Question: Is the present infinity small?

    Asked by anon-244320 to Ondrej, Jordan, Eleanor, Ed, Christine, Alice on 10 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Eleanor Jones

      Eleanor Jones answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      I’m not sure I fully understand your question 🤣By definition, there are no numbers bigger than infinity so it can’t be that small!

    • Photo: Edward Banks

      Edward Banks answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      All infinities are infinite, but some are more infinite than others!
      We don’t know, and maybe we never will, whether or not the universe itself is infinite. If it is, it’s still expanding; which would mean that the certain infinity there would get larger over time.

      Consider this fun maths though: think about fractions between 0 and 1. You could have 1/2. But them you can split between those points into 1/4 and 3/4. And then into 1/8, 3/8, 5/8 and 7/8. You can keep splitting and splitting and splitting forever, there’s no limit and thus there is an infinite number of fractions between 0 and 1. But what about between 1 and 2? You can do the same thing! So now you’ve got another infinite amount of fractions; and if you add them together you’ve got twice as many as you did before!
      But they are both still infinity.

    • Photo: Jordan McElwee

      Jordan McElwee answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      If I understand what you mean, then I think no! The smallest unit of time that we know is called Planck’s time, which is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds! I guess there could also be a time less than that… but this is the smallest unit of time that will ever be measurable (theoretically). In my opinion, this would mean that the present could not be infinitesimally small (though it is really really really really really small).
      If you want to look any further, I would look up Zeno’s paradoxes, they look at this question philosophically!

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