How can we truly understand infinity? What can you say you know that goes on for ever and ever and never ends? The world? It was once formed from a cloud of interstellar dust, and it wasn't a world then. And while it has lived - is living - it will have to die eventually and return to the pile of dust it once was.
Time? Time is a human concept. We decided how long a second should last, a minute, an hour, a year. And even then these minutes, these seconds have only been passing since we decided they existed and we are the ones who have imposed time back to the start of the universe.
Start. If infinity truly existed, there would be no place in our vocabulary for the word start, nor for the word end.
I have heard some people say that emotions are infinite, and they give rise to human creativity. That there is a never ending circle of life and death, children being born and people dying. None of these things are infinite. Not really. There was a first life, a single celled organism. When and where I don't know. There was a first human life too. Or rather a first germ-line mutation that led to Homo sapiens sapiens. And the answer to when that was haunts a lot of people. And eventually, who knows when, who knows where, there will be a final human life. Either through extinction or evolution, but it will happen. And when we die, so will our creativity. Our love, our hatred, our laughter and our tears. No. None of these are infinite. The life span of the human race is fleeting. The length of a life of an individual even more so. And this is a good thing, because our minds and our hearts are only equipped to deal with the finite.
Not even the universe is infinite, it has to end and it has to start somewhere and somewhen. And even if you believe in the big-bang-big-squish theory, when was the first bang? When will be the final squish?
Everything comes down to circles in the end. Nature likes circles and they fascinate us as well. And a circle shows, at least to my mind, the closest thing to infinity. Ever seen a Möbius strip? Follow it which ever way you will, it has only one side. Your finger tracing a side is inside, and then outside and then inside again. But even this is finite. For the infinity, the foreverness is trapped within this single piece of paper which itself is trapped within the world that we see and know. And how can something that ends hold something that doesn't?
As a human being, I look at the world from within the laws of finity. And to be honest, that sits a whole lot better than the concept of existing without end ever will. It scares me a little. Because to never end, it has to never grow or develop, and that leads to stagnation. I have never found something that I want to keep exactly as it is. Things need to grow and change, or else they wither and die. Even love. I love my parents dearly. I always have done and I always will do. But the love I feel for them now is different to that I felt when I was three, or ten, or will feel when I am thirty. Because it has grown with me. It has changed, and ended and started again in a different shape. It may have done it so gradually so as to fool you into thinking it was one continuous never ending thing, but it has changed, and it is different.
Infinity is one of those questions that will always be at the back of my mind, along with a few others, like, why do we use the word blue to describe the colour blue? When was it decided that that particular syllable(s) - blue, bleu, azule - was the right word to show what it was? I suspect that these questions will always muse in the back of my mind, never to be answered. But that's aright. Because by putting the concept never on it gives it a finite value, a 0 instead of a maybe that would otherwise be the case.
Still. The question remains. How can we truly understand infinity?
Time? Time is a human concept. We decided how long a second should last, a minute, an hour, a year. And even then these minutes, these seconds have only been passing since we decided they existed and we are the ones who have imposed time back to the start of the universe.
Start. If infinity truly existed, there would be no place in our vocabulary for the word start, nor for the word end.
I have heard some people say that emotions are infinite, and they give rise to human creativity. That there is a never ending circle of life and death, children being born and people dying. None of these things are infinite. Not really. There was a first life, a single celled organism. When and where I don't know. There was a first human life too. Or rather a first germ-line mutation that led to Homo sapiens sapiens. And the answer to when that was haunts a lot of people. And eventually, who knows when, who knows where, there will be a final human life. Either through extinction or evolution, but it will happen. And when we die, so will our creativity. Our love, our hatred, our laughter and our tears. No. None of these are infinite. The life span of the human race is fleeting. The length of a life of an individual even more so. And this is a good thing, because our minds and our hearts are only equipped to deal with the finite.
Not even the universe is infinite, it has to end and it has to start somewhere and somewhen. And even if you believe in the big-bang-big-squish theory, when was the first bang? When will be the final squish?
Everything comes down to circles in the end. Nature likes circles and they fascinate us as well. And a circle shows, at least to my mind, the closest thing to infinity. Ever seen a Möbius strip? Follow it which ever way you will, it has only one side. Your finger tracing a side is inside, and then outside and then inside again. But even this is finite. For the infinity, the foreverness is trapped within this single piece of paper which itself is trapped within the world that we see and know. And how can something that ends hold something that doesn't?
As a human being, I look at the world from within the laws of finity. And to be honest, that sits a whole lot better than the concept of existing without end ever will. It scares me a little. Because to never end, it has to never grow or develop, and that leads to stagnation. I have never found something that I want to keep exactly as it is. Things need to grow and change, or else they wither and die. Even love. I love my parents dearly. I always have done and I always will do. But the love I feel for them now is different to that I felt when I was three, or ten, or will feel when I am thirty. Because it has grown with me. It has changed, and ended and started again in a different shape. It may have done it so gradually so as to fool you into thinking it was one continuous never ending thing, but it has changed, and it is different.
Infinity is one of those questions that will always be at the back of my mind, along with a few others, like, why do we use the word blue to describe the colour blue? When was it decided that that particular syllable(s) - blue, bleu, azule - was the right word to show what it was? I suspect that these questions will always muse in the back of my mind, never to be answered. But that's aright. Because by putting the concept never on it gives it a finite value, a 0 instead of a maybe that would otherwise be the case.
Still. The question remains. How can we truly understand infinity?
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