![]() ![]() While “most physicists and mathematicians have become so enamored with infinity that they rarely question it,” Tegmark writes, infinity is just “an extremely convenient approximation for which we haven’t discovered convenient alternatives.” Tegmark believes that we need to discover the infinity-free equations describing the true laws of physics. But can infinities truly exist in any aspect of the physical world? Is space truly infinite, as some inflationary models of the universe assert, or is it in some way “pixelated” at the lowest level? In an extremely interesting book, This Idea Must Die, in which many eminent thinkers describe scientific ideas they consider wrong-headed, the physicist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argues that it is time to banish infinity from physics. ![]() Infinities implicitly pervade many familiar mathematical concepts, such as the idea of points as mentioned above, the idea of the continuum, and the concept of infinitesimals in calculus. Mathematicians have developed the theory of infinity to an exquisite degree - Georg Cantor’s concept of transfinite numbers is notable for its beauty, “a tower of infinities with no connection to physical reality,” as Natalie Wolchover put it in a recent Quanta article on the finite-infinite divide in mathematics.
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