From: Osher Doctorow [EMAIL PROTECTED], Sat. Sept. 21, 2002 10:39PM I've glanced over one of Tegmark's papers and it didn't impress me much, but maybe you've seen something that I didn't.
As for your question (have you ever been accused of being over-specific?), the best thing for a person not familiar with Georg Cantor's work in my opinion would be to read Garrett Birkhoff and Saunders MacLane's A Survey of Modern Algebra or any comparable modern textbook in what's called Abstract Algebra, Modern Algebra, Advanced Algebra, etc., or look under transfinite numbers, Georg Cantor, the cardinality/ordinality of the continuum, etc., etc. on the internet or in your mathematics-engineering-physics research library catalog or internet catalog. To answer even more directly, here it is. *Absolute infinity* if translated into mathematics means the *size* of the real line or a finite segment or half-infinite segment of the real line and things like that, and it is UNCOUNTABLE, whereas the number of discrete integers, e.g., -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ..., is called COUNTABLE. If you accept a real line or a finite line segment or a finite planar geometric figure like a circle or a 3-dimensional geometric figure like a sphere as being *physical*, then *absolute infinity* would be physical. If you don't accept these as being physical, then you can't throw them out either - if you did, you'd throw physics out. So there are *things* in mathematics that are related to physical things by *approximation*, in the sense that a mathematical straight line approximates the motion of a Euclidean particle in an uncurved universe or a region far enough from other objects as to make little difference to the problem. There are also many things in mathematics, including the words PATH and CURVE and SURFACE, that also approximate physical dynamics. Do you see what the difficulty is with over-simplifying or slightly misstating the question? Osher Doctorow ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, September 21, 2002 6:59 PM Subject: Tegmark's TOE & Cantor's Absolute Infinity > For those of you who are familiar with Max Tegmark's TOE, could someone tell > me whether Georg Cantor's " Absolute Infinity, Absolute Maximum or Absolute > Infinite Collections" represent "mathematical structures" and, therefore have > "physical existence". > > Thanks again for the help!! > > Dave Raub >
