Infinity

Cooperman , picture please .

I’m not sure if anyone else has thought of that before

That might be worthy of a Nobel prize  in science or maths ?

Hopefully some of the scientific community are looking into chit chat

You don't intend to pursue this concept yourself?

I am pretty sure if you were presenting this to the top 50 mathematicians in the world and refused to answer any of their questions like you do here, you will come out successful.

If you're a bookmaker and someone wants £1k on a 1/5 shot and someone else wants £1k on the same bet but is on winning sequence of 10 bets, based on your theory, you'd be more likely to accept the latter.

But there is no difference. In fact, you probably would have no knowledge of his previous bets.

nick, its a trap.

Ah , it’s a new concept , I don’t believe any other person has thought of it before , not hawking or newton or Einstein
I don’t know

detraveller, I refer you to my post at 14:30


If you put in hours of study today and find a horse for tomorrow which you back with confidence at 2/1, what if someone 200 miles away has the same horse as the last leg of a 10-fold after the previous nine have won?

Look at it this way , the only way that the mathematical theory of probability can be true is if we live in an infinite universe of infinite time and if we are infinite
But we aren’t , we only live for 70 years
Therefore that means there is a fundamental flaw in maths
In probability , and in all other sectors of mathematics

Nov 19, 2019 -- 1:44PM, i_agree_with_nick wrote:

detraveller, I refer you to my post at 14:30If you put in hours of study today and find a horse for tomorrow which you back with confidence at 2/1, what if someone 200 miles away has the same horse as the last leg of a 10-fold after the previous nine have won?

I agree with you. That is the math I know. Or knew before I realized we only live finite number of years which clearly renders all mathematical theories useless.

LFC, I don't know whether you're right or not but would you care to address the point in my previous post?

Of course if we do live in an infinite universe of infinite time ( and we might )then the laws of maths could be correct , they just won’t be correct for ourselves
So for all practical purposes the laws of maths are fundamentally flawed ( either in fact or as they exist )

TIME , that’s the important thing nick

detraveller • November 19, 2019 1:08 PM GMT

And what is the probability of tails on the 100th toss given 99 previous tosses resulted in tails.

The issue of whether the coin is biased must be considered.

It is assumed its not biased. But that's all irrelevant now anyways since either way, the laws of math are flawed.

NEVER Heard such garbage in all my life...

Firstly time does not exist, and if you believe it is a thing, well then show it to me.

Second, however old you live to has absolutely nothing to do with the odds of the next coin flip.

It's complete petulant bollox to try and state otherwise.

Is it the first time you've read any of lfc's posts?

no, i get it Det......

Let's not mince words here lfc is clearly barmy. But the rooms example is difficult to get your head around. Infinity, of which there are many different forms, is a difficult concept for me.

His idea of probability is clearly wrong.

The issue of whether maths exists in the absence of a universe (and hence time) has been discussed innumerable times. It's too difficult for me to get an angle on.

It’s perfectly straightforward I’ve done the hard work of thinking
Here it is , every time you walk 100 yds you prove that there is a fundamental flaw in maths
If there wasn’t you would never be able to walk 100 yds

But you must be able to walk 100 yds , because if you couldn’t then time wouldn’t exist
And if time didn’t exist the universe wouldn’t exist
And you wouldn’t exist

Understand now ?

Thanks for that lfc. Yes I do understand. You're barmier than I thought.

They said the same thing about Einsteins theory

Get a copy of Quantum Physics for Dummies.

That’s basic stuff , I like to think of something original , I’ve done that
That’s difficult to do

Go on lfc humor us what have you done original?

Might have to patent these last two pages of chit chat

Talking like a tw@t has been done many times before but I must admit you're good at it.

Here it is , every time you walk 100 yds you prove that there is a fundamental flaw in maths
If there wasn’t you would never be able to walk 100 yds

There are infinite amount of real numbers between 1 and the next smallest real number you could think of after 1.
How come I can still count to 2?

Comparing apples with oranges is your expertise and not having a brain helps you do that without worrying about the consequences.

And of course my argument is true because I will die at 70 and time works in reverse too.

It’s all there detraveller , I’ve explained it all
Read it again , and try to understand
There’s no point reading words of course , if you don’t understand words

Like I said, i'll die at 70. So clearly there is a flaw in your thinking.

Deary me detraveller , and you were the one who couldn’t understand the empty hotel room question
I explained that to you also
No need to say thanks

Tea time

Must be a luxury mental institution that. Enjoy.

lfc has an infinite ability to catch people in his net

who would deny that?

what a plank

Walking 100 yards is a physical act completely unrelated to time...

Nov 19, 2019 -- 7:04PM, jollyswagman wrote:

lfc has an infinite ability to catch people in his net who would deny that?

I think I would deny that because there are only a limited number of people on Betfair and obviously just a small number of other people on the planet. But given the number of possible extra-terrestrials looking in for signs of intelligence life on Earth then it's a possibility. They wont find any on here but it should be taken into account.

No Charles, sorry to correct you, he was not speaking of the amount but of the 'ability' which is clearly infinite because he will die at 70......

I'm sorry if you don't understand that as i have thought about it so it must be correct 

off course if the net is not sustainable he will still have the ability but the net will be empty

pecker I don't mind being corrected but I have no fckin idea what you are on about

sorry charlie but he doesnt need an infinite number of potential victims to have an infinite ability to catch people in his net. he is so successful at what he does many of his victims return time and again, one victim may be caught an infinite number of times

anything's possible i read it somewhere.

that's how i feel also when lfc posts, which was my point

The best part was when lfc said he wanted to patent this thread. As if some other nutter is going to steal that theory of his.

What’s the answer to the hotel thing?

Surely it’s not the moving people round rubbish (which has nothing to do with infinity, you can do it with 10 rooms and 11 people, it’s not a solution)

Isn’t the answer just no you can’t get any more people in if all the rooms are occupied?

The answer is indeed moving people to the next room.

How do you do it with 10 rooms and 11 people?

Just shuffle them all along and then when the last one is kicked out, put him back in the first one.

In both scenarios, someone is always in transit and not really in a room

That's good. But Hilbert makes them all occupy all the rooms successfully and no one is in transit. I wrongly said the same thing as you in one of my posts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj3_KqkI9Zo

It gets crazier. He even successfully occupies an infinite amount of guests by moving each guest to twice his room number.

He then does the same with an infinite number of buses containing infinite number of guests and gets them all a room too.

You could abuse infinity the way you want. You could debate whether it exists or not. But I don't think you can prove what Hilbert does is wrong. That is also probably why its called a paradox.

It’s fun maths but it’s a terrible example if you ask me.

You can move someone before, after or at the same time as the next room is vacated. It’s never explicit but it seemed he was moving people before the next room is vacated? So guests are nearly always in transit or sharing. It’s a con, no better than a ponzi scheme.

But can you prove it wrong? I don't think so.

But Hilbert makes them all occupy all the rooms successfully and no one is in transit.

Hmm, what did I miss here? Are people all moving at the same time or moving into an occupied room or moving into an empty room?

Not sure why you're bringing time into this.

Everyone in room n moves to room n+1. This is possible because there are infinite number of rooms. So if room n exists, then room n+1 also has to exist.

The method raises the question of time. That’s why I said the maths is fun but the example is terrible.

If you move people into other peoples rooms then they are sharing/ in transit so it’s a con.
If you move people into empty rooms, then you don’t need all the shuffling crap and you can just move your new guests into the empty rooms.

It’s either flawed or over-engineered.

if a hotel has an infinite number of rooms then they cannot all be full.

Hilbert presented is just as a mathematical idea. He wasn't out to build a hotel like that. It is the mathematics he wanted to argue not the practicality or engineering of building such a hotel. Of course something like this can never exist.

Fair enough. I have no issue with the practically, my issue is that the maths and the example don’t work together. Not even slightly.
It would have been more educational to forget the hotel nonsense and just show the maths.

det is right, the paradox is just highlighting that infinity+1 = infinity.

infinity is a strange concept and produces practical difficulties for mathematicians in tricky areas such as understanding black holes where you have an infinitely small singularity and infinitely dense matter and yet more mass is being continuously added.

I like the poem "Auguries of innocence" by William Blake which begins:

To see a world in a grain of sand,   
  And a heaven in a wild flower,   
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,   
  And eternity in an hour.

Nice poem.

To put this another way (and here you will see how bad my maths is...).

Hilbert was trying to show that infinity +1 = a bigger infinity

But his example with all the shuffling crap seemed to prove that 1+(1-1)^infinity=1
Or.....if you have an empty room and you add an occupant and remove an occupant an infinite number of times, you will have one empty room.

But that has nothing to do with what he’s trying to prove, ie that infinityx2 is bigger than, infinity+1 is bigger than infinity etc

Hilbert was trying to show that infinity +1 = a bigger infinity
I don't think so. it is still infinity.

And I am not sure what he was trying to prove with this. There's no original text for this. Some english guy presented it as Hilbert's idea.

Quite possible the hotel crap was added for fun by someone.

You`ll need an infinite number of chamber maids too, what happens when one is off sick?

You`ll need an infinite number of chamber maids too, what happens when one is off sick?

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

I think the motivation behind the hotel example was to explain the paradox of the fact that our universe is apparently expanding. The question arises, what are we expanding into?

The hotel example tries to explain this by arguing that, since there is no edge to the infinite [open] space, there is always room (and time, I suppose) to expand.

Perhaps in part, but on its own, that doesnt justify the answer to the question imo. If the hotel is expanding infinitely then put your new guests in the empty rooms. No need to wake all the current guests up and move them around.

Q. How can you accommodate an extra guest in an infinite hotel that is full?
A. Put them in one of the empty rooms. Or if you want, move all your guests around for no obvious to achieve the same thing

The hotel example is not trying to prove that the universe is infinitely expanding. An examination of the night sky via red shift and Cepeid variable stars is enough to demonstrate that. Instead, it's trying to explain how what we are seeing can be logically possible.

You can do it neatly just by maths and numbers. But that can be hard to grasp, so the numbers are converted into the physical example of an endless number of hotel rooms. Note that this is NUMBERS of hotel rooms, not an infinite lump of hotel room material, which already had vacant individual hotel rooms. It's an illustration of the maths and numbers which underpin calculations dealing with expansion of an infinite set.

I do sympathize with what you're saying. Quite frankly, anyone who says they accept all these concepts and understand the logic without any problems hasn't thought about it hard enough.

If you properly ( not think about infinity , or indeed it is even better to think about nothiness and what that means ( not everyone has the facility to do this )
Then you will be a funny feeling in your stomach
that’s all you need to know
How small life is and how big nothiness

* if you properly think about infinity , and better still nothiness

If you don’t get that funny feeling in your stomach ?
then you are not capable of understanding , not everyone is

You see you have a future , only when you have a present

From the comfort of my armchair, having given it 30 seconds of thought, it strikes me that these professors and award winning mathematicians would do well to keep the real universe of matter and things away from the fun but fantastical world of numbers, so they don’t get their silly little heads all confused, bless them. If one accepts that..

1. Numbers are abstract and only possible because we have tangible things in the universe to count and measure. Anything beyond countable or measurable is purely abstract and hypothetical and has very little use in the real world.

2. The only thing that is close to being tangible and infinite is nothing. It is defined as infinite because it is uncountable, immeasurably boundless, not that it is endlessly measurable or countable. Everything else in the universe is countable and measurable.

..then using hotels to explain fantastical (albeit fun) made up numbers is about as useful as having a mechanic give you a tarot card reading.

There are plenty of uses "in the real world" for purely abstract and hypothetical numbers. The square root of minus one is the obvious example. It doesn't exist. Yet without it you wouldn't be posting on here. The whole field of electronics would simply never have arisen without the use of imaginary numbers to calculate circuit theories or alternating currents.

The uses of infinity as a mathematical symbol? Without it Einstein would not have been able to calculate that the mass of an object becomes infinite as it approaches the speed of light. Without that, no theory of relativity. And without that, no GPS or Sky Sports (satellites would never be where they were intended to be).

More generally, all sorts of things are valid that have no basis "in the real world". Music, for instance. It's unique among the arts, in that it doesn't depend on "the real world" one bit for inspiration.

thought electronics needed only one and zero

If we were to count the numbers of stars in the sky it may seem infinite, but that's IMPOSSIBLE

Hmm I will look into some of those from my comfortable armchair, thanks SFB.

First thought is that music is completely countable. As are satellite positions. Theory yes, but theory subsequently proved to be actual and measurable. But undeniably, theoretical maths helping the real world. Not infinite numbers though.

Bob Dylan when starting out as a young man was asked what kind of musician he was ,
he thought about it , and then replied a 'mathematical musician'

what kind of music he made ? he answered...

mathematical music

also of course one of his most intriguing lyrics in one of his greatest songs

' ah but I was so much older then, im younger than that now'

That's the spirit. Much better than Roger Waters out of Pink Floyd:

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Miserable git.

beautiful song

its beginning to look as though the concept of infinity is on very shaky ground

Why? What changed?

nothing

What's the largest natural number?

that would depend on time

Ok. So let's say we start counting backwards from the largest number down to zero.

t=0.
Where do we start?

it matters not where we start or if we count backwards or forwards
the largest number depends on time

in the world, in our universe

If there was just 3 days worth of time left in the universe, what would be the largest number?

I don't know, but I do know it would be finite
not infinite

because of time

If its finite, and you cannot bound it, then its not finite you mug.

hmmmm, ok

By bound I mean an outer limit

its tea time....

This must be where all the geniuses hang out.

Please answer me this...

If the universe is ever expanding and the Galaxies are accelerating away. How can anything be accelerating for billions of years without reaching the speed of light?

So if the speed of light is met then nothing can be accelerating...

its tea time....

We should stick to mathematical infinity. The physical infinity, I don't have a clue about.

This might help answer your qusetion:

.
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/expansion-of-the-universe/616-is-the-universe-expanding-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-intermediate