well I've been watching some videos on youtube about maths and i had a thought of how big infinity actually is so i came up with a nice little analogy

image there is a piece of paper with the number 1 written on it... now imagine a person comes along and writes a 0 behind it, then another person comes along and puts a 0 after that and this repeats until everyone on earth has written a 0 behind it... wee would end up with a number that is 10^(7x10^9) or a 1 with around 7 billion 0s behind it... this is a pretty big number in itself but is nothing compared to infinity... now imagine this process repeats itself again and again until the end of humanity and you can imagine the enormous number you'd end up with but again it would be nothing compared to infinity... imagine wee have machines take over this process until the planet ends and the number would be astronomical, unimaginable even but it would still be nowhere near infinity... by looking at it this way you can start to see the scope of infinity and how unreachable a number it is...

there's some food for thought anyway

(22/11/2012 05:09 PM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:  I'm not sure whether that analogy really works.  I wouldn't think of infinity as a large number, rather a theoretical limitless number.
After all, infinity doesn't have to be large at all - negative infinity is the other way.  Or you can have stuff like 0.000000....00001 etc.

It's a philosophical debate whether a real life infinity exists though.

yeah it's a crazy concept... analogies like this just prove that no matter what the index of you number is you can never reach infinity... i was just trying to point out the scale of an infinite amount of something just thought it was a nice little mind bender

I prefer to use a circle as the model of infinity. It never ends nor begins, and goes on forever.

the way i think about it is it's simply an equation where everything is variable.
1+x,
x-3,
4:x
X times X