Then I started thinking spatially - what about the universe? If it is infinite, we are frighteningly small. In fact, if you think about a version of Google Maps that just keeps on zooming out and zooming out, we would vanish completely, except not really - we would just keep dwindling in size forever. Imagine looking for Earth on this cosmic map with the Hubble telescope and not being able to find even the Milky Way. And that's understatement when it comes to infinity. Again, it's mind boggling.
But then I thought: how can it not be infinite? In a hypothetical situation where people could instantly travel as far as they wanted to, can you imagine coming up against some kind of blank "edge of the map"? (like in RTS games.) Mind = blown. I can't imagine it. I just can't picture a limited universe - I mean, automatically, I would think "what is outside the boundaries of the universe?"
But a universe can't have spatial boundaries, can it? Can the laws of physics just stop at some point?
Maybe they could if there were other universes with different laws of physics crowded in around us - but then we would have to quibble about the definition of the word, and at the end of the day, whatever word we chose to mean "everything that exists" would replace our definition of universe, and we would still have the boundaries problem.
Bah. Infinity, you are vindicated. Finity, you are in a league of your own. People who are still reading, you almost rate a league of your own too, but if I said that, then we'd have another problem...
I agree that it's hard to imagine boundaries on the universe. It's easy to imagine an end to land, like in an RTS. But the space between the stars and planets and black holes and all that is already something of a nothingness, so how could "nothing" end?
ReplyDeleteWhen I think of God being infinite, I think it must have been really boring before creating the universe :P. But then again, that's thinking within the boundaries of time.
I'm never gonna sleep at this rate.