The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless And Endless

by Barrow, John D.

• ISBN13: 9780099443728
• ISBN10: 0099443724
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-01
• Publisher: Trafalgar Square

Summary

A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless. Everything you might want to know about infinity in history, and all the way to today's cutting-edge science. Throughout history, the Infinite has been a dangerous idea. Men have lost their lives, their careers, or their freedom for talking about it. Where did the idea come from, and what is it telling us about the universe? Can there actually be infinities, or is infinity just a label for something that is never reached? Can you do an infinite number of things in a finite amount of time? Is the universe infinite? Will it exist forever? All manner of paradoxes and fantasies characterize an infinite universe. If our universe is infinite, then an infinite number of exact copies of you are at this very moment reading an identical sentence on an identical planet somewhere else in the universe. So what is it like to live in a universe where nothing is original, where you can live forever, where anything that can be done, is done, over and over again? These are some of the deep questions that the idea of the infinite pushes us to ask.The Infinite Bookwill explore these provocative questions and the strange answers that scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and theologians have come up with to deal with its threats to our sanity.

Author Biography

John D. Barrow, a distinguished scientist and popular science author, is Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His best-selling books include Theories of Everything and Impossibility.

Table of Contents

Preface	xiii
Much Ado about Everything
The Rough Guide to Infinity	1	(3)
Intimations of the Infinite	4	(15)
Zeno Hour	19	(4)
Infinity, Almost and Actual, Fictitious and Factual
Darkness at Noon	23	(3)
A Purely Aristotelian Relationship	26	(5)
Infinity and God	31	(8)
A Little Kant	39	(2)
Welcome to the Hotel Infinity
Hotels	41	(1)
Experiences of the Hotel Infinity	42	(7)
The Hotel Infinity's Accounts	49	(2)
Infinity Is Not a Big Number
An Immaculate Misconception	51	(1)
Albert of Saxony's Paradox	52	(3)
Galileo's Paradox	55	(7)
Cadmus and Harmonia	62	(2)
Terminator 0, 1/2, and 1	64	(3)
Countable Infinities	67	(2)
Uncountable Infinities	69	(4)
The Towering Infinito	73	(4)
The Madness of Georg Cantor
Cantor and Son	77	(2)
The Chronicle of Kronecker	79	(6)
Cantor, God, and Infinity - the Trinity with Affinity	85	(5)
All's Sad that Ends Bad	90	(3)
Infinity Comes in Three Flavours
Triple Top	93	(2)
Let's Get Physical	95	(10)
Naked Infinities	105	(5)
The Great Blue Yonder	110	(3)
Infinity on the Back Foot	113	(2)
Is the Universe Infinite?
Everything That Is	115	(7)
Cosmology Goes Underground	122	(8)
Bent Universes	130	(5)
The Problem of Topology	135	(4)
The Problem of Uniformity	139	(7)
The Problem of Acceleration	146	(2)
Where Does This Leave Us?	148	(1)
The Shining	149	(6)
The Infinite Replication Paradox
A Universe Where Nothing Is Original	155	(4)
The Great Escape	159	(3)
The Temporal Version - Been There, Done That	162	(4)
The Never-ending Story	166	(4)
The Ethics of the Infinite	170	(7)
Worlds Without End
Other Worlds in History	177	(7)
Out of This World	184	(9)
Inflation - Here, There, and Everywhere	193	(5)
Conscious Interventions - Men in Black	198	(5)
Simulated Universes	203	(5)
How Should We Then Live?	208	(5)
Making Infinity Machines
Super-tasks	213	(5)
Rubbing Thomson's Lamp	218	(5)
Some Norse Code	223	(3)
The End-game Problem	226	(2)
Relativity and the Amazing Shrinking Man	228	(3)
A Matter of Timing	231	(2)
Newtonian Super-tasks	233	(4)
Relativistic Super-tasks	237	(4)
Big Bangs and Big Crunches	241	(6)
Living Forever
Childhood's End	247	(2)
The Sociology of Eternity	249	(5)
The Problem-Page of the Unending Future	254	(3)
The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten	257	(3)
Incestuous Time Travel	260	(2)
The Grandmother Paradox	262	(2)
Consistent Histories	264	(1)
Tourists From the Future	264	(3)
Time Travellers in the Financial World: Perpetual Money Machines	267	(3)
Why You Can't Change the Past	270	(3)
Infinity - Where Will It All End?	273	(4)
Notes	277	(40)
Index	317