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Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

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Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

#51
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> infinity is something only present in our math and not in the universe This is true of all mathematical objects. The number 7 doesn't exist in the universe either. It's not a physical object.

OP didn't argue that finite numbers are physical objects, they said that infinities are not present in the universe. For example, I could in theory hand you 7 electrons but there are not infinity electrons for me to hand to you.

it's OK. electrons don't "exist" discretely, either.

At best, when you "hand me 7 electrons", you're directing me towards the fat part of 7 probability distributions, so we're back to math again...

Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

#53
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP didn't argue that finite numbers are physical objects, they said that infinities are not present in the universe. For example, I could in theory hand you 7 electrons but there are not infinity electrons for me to hand to you.

That sounds like a weird interpretation of "to be present in the universe" to me. Also I was under the impression that it's unknown whether the universe contains an infinite number of electrons or not.

It's certainly known that the observable universe does not contain an infinite number of electrons, as it has a finite size and finite mass. And it's rather moot to talk about the space beyond the observable universe that can never affect us or anything we can observe in any way whatsoever, so any other statements about it are inherently unfalsifiable, so all the science of physics is relevant only w.r.t. the (finite) observable universe.

Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like taking a bed apart and rearranging it into two beds, each identical to the original bed, without adding any more material.

Oh that is pretty cool. I wonder if it could be proved with differential geometry for the sphere, which has a simple paramertization

The ability to do it is equivalent to the axiom of choice, so my guess is going to be "not without considerable effort".

Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

#55
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I can say that there are precisely 0 african elephants in the room with me right now, so no, 0 and other integers don't have this problem. Similarly, the rationals are clearly realizable with perfect precision. The reals however are a different problem, and it's not scientifically possible to prove that the ratio between the length and radius of any object is exactly pi (that it is a perfect circle). However, i…

That's just because you use the word "exact", though. Exactitude doesn't exist in the universe as we understand it. There's a difference between something not being instantiated in this universe and being unscientific, though. If we produce a model of the universe that doesn't make a single incorrect prediction given all data available, and it predicts infinities to exist in some strange but quite real cases, is it u…

> Exactitude doesn't exist in the universe as we understand it.

Of course exactitude exists. For example, two electrons have exactly the same charge. A photon has exactly 0 charge.

> There's a difference between something not being instantiated in this universe and being unscientific, though.

Well, science is a particular way of studying what exists. Studying something that doesn't exist is unscientific (of course, you can use science to try to determine IF something exists).

But there are also things that are outside the reach of the methods of science, so they are unscientific in this sense. Questions such as "did some god create the universe" are unscientific because it is simply impossible to apply the methods of science to arrive at an answer to this question.

Similarly, asking "is the universe infinite in size" is unscientific, because it is impossible to apply the methods of science and arrive at a definite answer to this question.

> If we produce a model of the universe that doesn't make a single incorrect prediction given all data available, and it predicts infinities to exist in some strange but quite real cases, is it unscientific?

If it predicts actual infinities exist in certain conditions, than it is not going to be a testable theory in those conditions. It may still be a perfectly workable model, just as GR is perfectly workable despite predicting singularities at the center of black holes. That doesn't mean that the singularities exist, it means that GR breaks down at certain points.

But even if you had a physical theory that relied on something like a Banach-Tarski construction, you could never distinguish between an actual infinity of points, leading to two perfectly solid, perfectly identical spheres; and an arbitrarily large number of points, leading either to two perfectly solid but slightly different-sized spheres; or two identically-sized spheres with small holes.

Of course, without some need to specify the number of points, you would be well positioned to use the infinite variant. But if someone asked you if this means that the sphere really has an infinite number of points, the answer would have to be that you can't be sure.

Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

#56
post #43
post #27

Can someone correct me if im wrong? What i see here is a splitting of the set of points in the sphere? However the set of points in the sphere is not really the sphere. A point has no volume so no matter how many you add together you don't get something with a volume. This seems more akin to splitting the natural numbers into odd and even numbers which are all equally large. The language that i see in this article an…

> A point has no volume so no matter how many you add together you don't get something with a volume Not true. If you add uncountably many infinitesimal objects they can add up to noninfinitesimal object, that's how integration works in math, it's pretty confusing cause there's many kinds of infinity and they allow some unintuitive things to happen, but if they didn't worked we couldn't move (see Zeno paradox). Banac…

Points, though, as traditonally defined, are not infinitessimal. They are literally zero in extent, having only a defined location.

Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

#57
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember sitting in maths lectures and wishing that when they did thing like prove the intermediate value theorem they'd make it clearer that what was going on wasn't so much "We're rigorously proving that this thing that seems obvious is true" as "We're checking that the formalisation we introduced earlier is fit for purpose". > I think things like the Banach-Tarski theorem are the other side of that coin: they'…

What I mean is: if you imagine someone drawing up a requirements document for the team assigned to the task of axiomatising geometry, and somebody asked "Do we want our model of geometry to support cutting up a ball into five pieces, moving the pieces rigidly, and reassembling them into two copies?", I think their first idea would be to answer "no". So it isn't parallel to the intermediate value theorem, but opposite…

The whole idea of a proof system is that there are some things you can't have without also having other things. The Banach-Tarski theorem is a consequence of things we want. You don't get to pick and choose everything at once.

Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

#58
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember sitting in maths lectures and wishing that when they did thing like prove the intermediate value theorem they'd make it clearer that what was going on wasn't so much "We're rigorously proving that this thing that seems obvious is true" as "We're checking that the formalisation we introduced earlier is fit for purpose". I think things like the Banach-Tarski theorem are the other side of that coin: they're s…

> I remember sitting in maths lectures and wishing that when they did thing like prove the intermediate value theorem they'd make it clearer that what was going on wasn't so much "We're rigorously proving that this thing that seems obvious is true" as "We're checking that the formalisation we introduced earlier is fit for purpose". > I think things like the Banach-Tarski theorem are the other side of that coin: they'…

The Banach-Tarski theorem motivated the idea of amenable groups in topological group theory. Understanding exactly what that means is on my todo list, but I think the basic idea is that a given space can have additive measures invariant under some transformation groups but not others. Particularly, the Banach-Tarski paradox shows that regular old 3-dimensional Euclidean space doesn't have an additive measure invariant under rotation and translation. On the other hand, 2-dimensional Euclidean space does have it.

Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The language that i see in this article and elsewhere however is suggesting that we actually duplicated the sphere (doubled the volume). > This seems incorrect. It isn't incorrect. You're right that the number of points in the sphere does not equate to the volume of the sphere. But the Banach-Tarski theorem does in fact let you double the volume. It is considered to be of interest because it does the following: 1.…

Come to think of it, the fact that two spheres contain the same number of points as one sphere does would seem to be closely related to why it's possible to produce two spheres from one sphere just by rearranging the points. You can obviously produce a large sphere from a small sphere by rearranging the points, as long as you're willing to handle one point at a time -- that's what scaling is. But that requires an unc…

It is deeper than that. There is no way to do a similar duplication of a 2-dimensional disc. Why is it different in 3 dimensions? That is a property of the transformation group (rotation and translation) rather than 3-space itself.

Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning

#60
Infinity is the axiom of paradox. Does the inclusion Infinity complete an otherwise incomplete set of axioms? It solves the halting problem for a finite Turing Machine.

I don't buy the diagonalization proof as anything more than the Pythagoreom Theorom. You have infinite rows, and infinite columns. Infinity is Schrodinger's Cat. Once you check in on the state (nth row by mth column) the only thing you can say about the diagonal number is that is hasn't occurred in the rows up to that point, not beyond, nor in the columns (if n > m).

Ergo, Infinity is a paradox, and only mathematical in the absurd.

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