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How to explain infinity to kids

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Re: How to explain infinity to kids

#101
post #77

As a kid, I asked my mom if all numbers have a name, she said yes, and then I asked the obvious follow-up question: If there are infinite numbers, and all numbers have a name, then there must exist a number called door, another one named airplane, because at some point you would run out of numbery names, I don't remember what she said, but she didn't answer the question. That question was unresolved for me until rece…

> If there are infinite numbers, and all numbers have a name, then there must exist a number called door, another one named airplane, because at some point you would run out of numbery names, I don't remember what she said, but she didn't answer the question.

Ah, this is the philosophical distinction between every possible thing, and every conceivable thing.

The set of possible number names may be very large or infinite, but it is assembled from a small set of symbols like "one", "two" "seventeen" "million", "and", "times" and "three" "to the power of", etc.

A number called "door" is conceivable (like superman) but it is not a possible under the rules of maths (or physics in superman's case) because "door" is not in that set of symbols.

The set of the possible is a subset of the conceivable. Both sets might be infinite.

Re: How to explain infinity to kids

#102
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Imagine taking all the numbers that you could reach by counting,” I said. “Then add one more, after all of them. That is infinity.” Disclaimer: I'm an adult that doesn't understand infinity. If you "add one more" you're still counting.

You are correct. Counting here changes its meaning. The correct form should be "all the numbers reachable by counting in finite time ". E.g. you can count up to 100 in a minute. Up to a million in a month[1]. Up to a billion in quite a long, but finite time. You take all such numbers, and you say that a number named Omega comes just after all of them (just like million and one comes just after all numbers that are le…

What I hear you say is that you can count to finite numbers in finite time, and infinite numbers in infinite time. That doesn't help me in understanding infinity.

Re: How to explain infinity to kids

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard a really good interpretation of this recently. In all these infinite universes, surely there's one where there's an ice cube in the middle of the sun, since that's one possible configuration of matter. But no! There's no story that ends with an ice-cube in the middle of the sun. There's no sequence of events that could have resulted in that so it's not in the space of possible universes.

Why do you believe there is no sequence of events that could end with an ice cube in the middle of a sun? One scenario I would not rule out is a large icy comet moving at large speed straight for a sun. Is there no combination of size and speed for which that would result in a small ice cube in the centre of a sun?

Hm, it would probably not be cube shaped though. But I agree, we could even calculate that one. It would certainly be an interesting spectacle.

Going back to the sequence of events argument, I think that implies that all universes agree on similar rules like ours (Physics), as we could only deduce this kind of argument with this assumption.

Maybe there is a universe where ice is scorching hot and all sun cores consist of it, and as matter cools it evaporates? Maybe there is even a universe where gravity and orbital mechanics work in a way to produce cube shaped stellar bodies?

Re: How to explain infinity to kids

#104
post #77

As a kid, I asked my mom if all numbers have a name, she said yes, and then I asked the obvious follow-up question: If there are infinite numbers, and all numbers have a name, then there must exist a number called door, another one named airplane, because at some point you would run out of numbery names, I don't remember what she said, but she didn't answer the question. That question was unresolved for me until rece…

The difference between "infinite" and "all possible" seems to be really unintuitive. The example I got to is that there are infinite even numbers, but not all natural numbers are even. This also maniests itself when people talk about infinite universes. "If there are infinite universes, there has to be one in which X". Not necessarialy. Maybe only even universes exist and universes in which X is the case might all be…

I internally-resolved this when I used to get [horribly, painfully] lost infinity back in in my acid-taking days with the short maxim "anything that can be, is".

Re: How to explain infinity to kids

#105
post #22

John Conway's On Numbers and Games has a great overview of infinities. And since it's about games it'll be great for teaching kids too!

Another book I really liked that talks about infinity is "A Certain Ambiguity", by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal.

Re: How to explain infinity to kids

#108
post #77

As a kid, I asked my mom if all numbers have a name, she said yes, and then I asked the obvious follow-up question: If there are infinite numbers, and all numbers have a name, then there must exist a number called door, another one named airplane, because at some point you would run out of numbery names, I don't remember what she said, but she didn't answer the question. That question was unresolved for me until rece…

If you're referring to real numbers, then virtually no real numbers have a name. If all real numbers had a name then you could order them alphabetically and put them in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, which we know is impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument

to continue the discussion, there are many kinds of infinities, and some are larger than others.

one of the smaller kinds of infinities is "countable". we say a collection of countably infinite things is countable if, intuitively, we can count them (as the parent says, put them in 1:1 correspondence with the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, ....).

there are only a countably infinite number of rational numbers, since each rational number has the form p / q, where p and q are (perhaps negative) integers. if we made a large 2d grid of all integer grid points, we could regard each rational number p/q as a grid point (p, q). Then we can count the grid points by starting at the origin of the grid (0, 0) * and spiraling outwards. This will eventually count every grid point, so this gives us a way to count all the rationals.

as the parent post says, by Cantor's diagonalisation argument we can demonstrate that we can't count the real numbers, so there are a lot more reals than rationals. it's a strictly bigger kind of infinity.

even if we start inventing new notation for particular reals we care about (e.g. pi, e, pi^e, door, super(door, |^|^bat)man, ) -- whatever you like provided it is well-defined, we can only name at most countably many reals, leaving a remainder of uncountably many un-named reals. we can single out any particular real that can be well-defined, and mint a new name for it, but we can only do this for at most countably many such reals, while the bulk of the reals escape naming.

* the origin (0, 0) corresponds to 0 / 0 which isn't a rational number, and some rational numbers such as 4 have multiple representations as coordinates. For example we could write 4 as 4 / 1 or 8 / 2 or 40 / 10 or -16 / -4 ... so strictly speaking by demonstrating we can count all of the 2d integer grid points shows that there are at most a countably infinite number of rationals. but since each natural number is a rational, and there are countably many rationals, we know there's at least a countably infinite number of rationals.

Re: How to explain infinity to kids

#109
post #77

As a kid, I asked my mom if all numbers have a name, she said yes, and then I asked the obvious follow-up question: If there are infinite numbers, and all numbers have a name, then there must exist a number called door, another one named airplane, because at some point you would run out of numbery names, I don't remember what she said, but she didn't answer the question. That question was unresolved for me until rece…

If you're referring to real numbers, then virtually no real numbers have a name. If all real numbers had a name then you could order them alphabetically and put them in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, which we know is impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument

Not quite, you can't order all natural numbers alphabetically either but that doesn't mean you can't count them.

A better way to count based on names would be to first count all single letter names alphabetically, then all two letter names alphabetically, etc.

Re: How to explain infinity to kids

#110
post #77

As a kid, I asked my mom if all numbers have a name, she said yes, and then I asked the obvious follow-up question: If there are infinite numbers, and all numbers have a name, then there must exist a number called door, another one named airplane, because at some point you would run out of numbery names, I don't remember what she said, but she didn't answer the question. That question was unresolved for me until rece…

> If there are infinite numbers, and all numbers have a name, then there must exist a number called door, another one named airplane, because at some point you would run out of numbery names, I don't remember what she said, but she didn't answer the question. Ah, this is the philosophical distinction between every possible thing, and every conceivable thing. The set of possible number names may be very large or infin…

> A number called "door" is conceivable (like superman) but it is not a possible under the rules of maths (or physics in superman's case) because "door" is not in that set of symbols.

Certainly you are able to represent "door" in a base-64 numbering system? (or base-36, or even base-28)

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