Philosophy
Apparently the title of this documentary also has something to do with Toy Story? Well, I haven't seen that movie, but I can tell you what this documentary is about... Infinity. The most obvious way to start thinking about infinity is through numbers: take any number, and you'll soon realize that there is no such thing as the biggest number because you can always add 1. No, a googol won't do it, nor even a googolplex or Graham's number. Yes, these numbers contain more zeros than there are atoms in the observable universe, but they still fall short, infinitely short, in fact, of infinity.
But the strangeness doesn't end there because infinity may not only be a mathematical conceptual idea: infinity raises all kinds of interesting scientific and philosophical questions and paradoxes (what Immanuel Kant called antinomies of reason) about the physical universe that even modern cosmology doesn't quite know what to do with: is space infinite? If not, what's beyond its edge? Infinite empty space? What about time? If it is, and the amount of matter in the universe is finite, then everything that could logically happen has happened, and will continue to happen, an infinite number of times... And hey, are there an infinite amount of universes? And as you'll see in this fascinating documentary, this is just the beginning of the weirdness:
For a fascinating treatment of the problems of infinity, check out the documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
- God's Infinite Properties
A student and playground regular is working on a senior thesis with me about natural language uses of utterances referring to the infinite. He's got an interesting puzzle that I figured I'd throw out there for everyone to play with. There are...
- Why Do You Know That?
Let's have some more fun with this one. It's the converse of "auto mechanics to quantum mechanics," where the idea now is to contribute those bits of knowledge that seem really cool even if they are not directly applicable to anything. My contribution:The...
- Schrödinger?s Cat... In 60 Seconds
We've seen in previous episodes of this 60-second Adventures in Thought series, all sorts of philosophical, logical, mathematical and scientific paradoxes and all-around weirdness. To remind you, we've seen Zeno's paradox concerning motion,...
- Everything And Nothing - Everything
You may find this hard to believe, but we've known about the true size of the universe for only about 100 years. When Copernicus proposed his revolutionary heliocentric model, for instance, he still believed in the existence of a perfect celestial...
- An Infinite Universe?
If the universe is infinite now it has always been infinite. This is the opinion of many astronomers today as can be concluded from the following series of interviews, but the opinions differ much more than I had expected. Many astronomers do not have...
Philosophy
To Infinity and Beyond
But the strangeness doesn't end there because infinity may not only be a mathematical conceptual idea: infinity raises all kinds of interesting scientific and philosophical questions and paradoxes (what Immanuel Kant called antinomies of reason) about the physical universe that even modern cosmology doesn't quite know what to do with: is space infinite? If not, what's beyond its edge? Infinite empty space? What about time? If it is, and the amount of matter in the universe is finite, then everything that could logically happen has happened, and will continue to happen, an infinite number of times... And hey, are there an infinite amount of universes? And as you'll see in this fascinating documentary, this is just the beginning of the weirdness:
For a fascinating treatment of the problems of infinity, check out the documentary Dangerous Knowledge.
- God's Infinite Properties
A student and playground regular is working on a senior thesis with me about natural language uses of utterances referring to the infinite. He's got an interesting puzzle that I figured I'd throw out there for everyone to play with. There are...
- Why Do You Know That?
Let's have some more fun with this one. It's the converse of "auto mechanics to quantum mechanics," where the idea now is to contribute those bits of knowledge that seem really cool even if they are not directly applicable to anything. My contribution:The...
- Schrödinger?s Cat... In 60 Seconds
We've seen in previous episodes of this 60-second Adventures in Thought series, all sorts of philosophical, logical, mathematical and scientific paradoxes and all-around weirdness. To remind you, we've seen Zeno's paradox concerning motion,...
- Everything And Nothing - Everything
You may find this hard to believe, but we've known about the true size of the universe for only about 100 years. When Copernicus proposed his revolutionary heliocentric model, for instance, he still believed in the existence of a perfect celestial...
- An Infinite Universe?
If the universe is infinite now it has always been infinite. This is the opinion of many astronomers today as can be concluded from the following series of interviews, but the opinions differ much more than I had expected. Many astronomers do not have...