Does infinity exist in reality?

Comments

My thesis supervisor, George Boolos, wrote his own dissertation on the analytic hierarchy, whose description I shall omit. Suffice it to say, for present purposes, that the sets it concerns are infinite, and there are infinitely many of them. At the end of his oral defense, one of his examiners said, "So tell me, Mr Boolos. What does the analytic hierarchy have to do with the real world?" George's response was: It's part of it.

Perhaps you had in mind physical reality. Then the question is a scientific one. Space is not, according to current physical theory, infinite in extent. But physics, in its contemporary form, typically describes both space and time as continuous (though, as I understand it, there are or at least have been proposals to quantize space). If that is correct, then space is, in one sense, infinite, in so far as there are infinitely many points even in bounded regions of space.

Read another response by Richard Heck

Read another response about Mathematics, Science