On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 9:03 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote:
>> If infinite distances makes you squeamish I don't see how you can >> consistently embrace infinite outcomes. And besides this is not >> mathematics, in physics nothing is provably infinite, nobody has ever >> found an infinite number of anything. >> > > *> It's not a matter of, or a case of being squeamish with infinite > outcomes. I just don't see how cosmologists can claim the universe is flat > -- which means infinite in spatial extent -- if it starts small and expands > for a finite time.* > Infinity is not a number, infinity is a process that evolves in time. If a cosmologists says the universe is infinite he means that a pulse of light will keep getting more distant from its starting point and never return. I don't know if the universe is infinite or not but I see nothing obviously absurd with the idea. And when cosmologists say the universe started at a singularity what they mean is it started at a place they don't understand, they never claimed to know everything. In physics "singularity" doesn't mean infinite density or zero volume, it means "our theories break down here and produce ridiculous results". John K Clark > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3wK2pNXnHkVEPa9jKsdxk0ObNciXtWbgRL8_ZJRQ4Dgw%40mail.gmail.com.
