Originally Posted By: Bill S.
In a "real" infinity there cannot be any change or passage of time or any division. Trying to think of something that is spaceless and timeless is extremely difficult; even the terminology we use to try to describe it is anchored in our experience of time and space.


B.S. You seem to have some problem grasping the meaning of infinite. It simply means that something cannot be counted, even in principle. There is absolutely no reason you cannot count a subset of an infinite group. Infinity is a mathematical principle, but then a whole lot of other things that are mathematical principles have physical interpretations. So infinity can be used just as well for physical interpretations as 1 + 1 = 2. Maybe you should see if you can find a copy of George Gamow's book "1, 2, 3 ... Infinity". It has a fairly decent discussion of infinity in it.

In the meantime you might just accept the fact that infinity in a physical terms doesn't mean much. If the universe is infinite in time and/or space all that means is that it is uncountably large. But we don't really have to handle the full extent all at once. We just have to handle the subset that we can observe and that part is a countable subset of the whole universe.

As an example. Suppose out in my back yard I have an infinitely large pile of rocks. I decide to build a wall to hide the pile, so I go out and select 200 rocks out of the pile to use in building the wall. The pile is still infinitely large, but I can certainly work with the pile one rock at a time.

Bill Gill

Last edited by Bill; 10/26/11 07:44 PM. Reason: Added example
C is not the speed of light in a vacuum.
C is the universal speed limit.