Were does the concept of infinity fit into physics and cosmology?

Not very easily. It always seems to come from a particular mathematical expression of how we think nature works. No one has ever observed anything that is 'infinite'. Even the distant reaches of the infinite universe are out of reach if our universe came into existence a finite number of years ago as data suggests. Our horizon is only 15 billion light years or so in radius even if the universe were spatially infinite in truth. We will never know this directly except as a logical ( mathematical) inference from our models of the universe to which we fit the data we have. The other places where infinity could rear its head is inside black holes, which are forever hidden from us by event horizons, and inside the deep structure of fundamental particles and space-time at scales below 10^-16 centimeters. Quantum electrodynamics requires that particles be infinitely small, and that we have to 'sum up' an infinite number of quantum processes in order to get accurate predictions. The mathematics does this for us via complex 'integrals over Feynman diagrams' but whether there are really an infinite number of processes actually happening, or whether this is just a mathematical approximation, is not known.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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