{"id":71646,"date":"2022-07-01T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-01T17:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=71646"},"modified":"2022-07-15T10:41:06","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T14:41:06","slug":"concept-of-infinity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/concept-of-infinity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Concept of Infinity: What Does It Really Mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is infinity? How can we easily understand the concept of infinity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Infinity is a hard concept to grasp logically. The Beginning of Infinity<\/em>‘s author David Deutsch believes that the human mind has a natural aversion to it. That’s why he found a way of explaining it that anybody can understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more to have a better understanding of infinity as a concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

What Is Infinity?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Many people find it easier to think of infinity as some arbitrarily large number, but that\u2019s a poor approximation. Instead, we can illustrate the concept of infinity with a simple thought experiment<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine a person standing in an endless hallway. He walks an endless distance down that hallway. Once he\u2019s done so, there\u2019s still an endless distance ahead of him. He repeats this process countless times, but there is still an immeasurable distance between him and the end of the hallway. This is why Deutsch says, no matter how much knowledge we create, we\u2019ll never know everything\u2014in other words, no matter how far we travel, we\u2019ll never reach the end of the hallway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s also why imagining infinity as a really big number doesn\u2019t work: Infinity doesn\u2019t obey the same rules as finite numbers do.<\/strong> Instead, it may help to picture infinity as an unreachable destination; no matter how long we travel, we never get closer to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All Infinities Aren\u2019t the Same<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It will be easier to understand the endless hallway thought experiment if you recognize that there are many different sizes of infinity<\/a>. That\u2019s counterintuitive\u2014surely infinity should equal infinity\u2014but we can prove it with an easy example: <\/p>\n\n\n\n