Strange Math Part 6: WHY INFINITY FEELS LONELY
STRANGE MATH - PART 6 WHY INFINITY FEELS LONELY When mathematics becomes too large for intuition - and strangely close to the human heart Strange Opening Question If infinity has no end... where does it begin? If it contains endlessly many numbers, points, possibilities and perhaps even worlds... why does thinking about it sometimes feel strangely empty? We use the symbol: ∞ as if it were a very large number. But infinity is not simply a very big number . It is something far stranger. And mathematics discovered something almost unbelievable: There isn't just one infinity. There are different sizes of infinity. And once you enter that world... your ordinary intuition begins to break. Welcome to Strange Math . The Amazing Fact Consider the natural numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... They never end. Now consider all the real numbers between 0 and 1: 0.1, 0.25, 0.333..., 0.728491... There are infinitely many of them too. But here comes the strange part: |ℕ| < |...