Infinity Equals Zero

bunny.jpg What most peo­ple would call split­ting hairs, I call find­ing seams, weak­ness­es and assump­tions that, for me at least, need expli­cat­ed to my some­what sat­is­fac­tion. Most­ly these things end up cir­cu­lar­ly and noth­ing gets resolved except my under­stand­ing of cer­tain sub­tleties. Infin­i­ty equals zero, or some­thing like it.

Noth­ing mate­r­i­al [that I can think of] is infi­nite. Num­bers are infi­nite but aren’t mate­r­i­al, and the uni­verse might appear infi­nite, but isn’t, since it is bound­ed by what­ev­er it is expand­ing into. Void exists out­side the uni­verse and is zero. Infin­i­ty and zero are both abstrac­tions and have no mate­r­i­al exam­ple. They can be described and under­stood but not seen.

You can­not show me zero whoopee cush­ions because if I see a whoopee cush­ion there are more than zero whoopee cush­ions.

Like­wise, you can­not show me infi­nite rub­ber chick­ens because it would take an infi­nite­ly long time to do so. Time, a form of mea­sure­ment, is con­cerned with find­ing the lim­its of things and, I think, would be quite use­less in try­ing to mea­sure some­thing lim­it­less. Also, as far as I know, time is not infi­nite. Per­haps using rel­a­tiv­i­ty you could show me infi­nite rub­ber chick­ens, but I’d much rather have a ham sand­wich.

Back to the void. If void is zero [lack, a null set, empti­ness] and void [that which is out­side the uni­verse] is infi­nite [bound­less, immea­sure­able, illim­itable] then they are equal in some sense. Both are abstrac­tions of mea­sur­ing the immea­sure­able.

Assum­ing that par­al­lel uni­vers­es exist, what I’ve been twirling around here must be tak­en to a high­er order. If par­al­lel uni­vers­es exist then the void that one uni­verse expands in to is less than mean­ing­less. The deter­mi­na­tion then lies in dis­cov­er­ing whether par­al­lel uni­vers­es are bound by some­thing or oth­er­wise exist inde­pen­dent­ly is some­thing I’ll need to med­i­tate upon fur­ther.

It is impor­tant for me to hold on to the real­iza­tion engage­ment I have final­ly reached in my under­stand­ing of the con­cepts of zero and infin­i­ty. While it is easy to reach the con­clu­sion that they are equal while exam­in­ing them with the expand­ing uni­verse the­o­ry, the par­al­lel uni­vers­es par­a­digm adds a bit more com­plex­i­ty than I can grap­ple with at the moment.

I’m right, right?

33 thoughts on “Infinity Equals Zero”

  1. I com­plete­ly agree. I think the con­cept of infin­i­ty and zero are akin to the note A sharp and B flat- the same thing but com­ing from dif­fer­ent direc­tions. I have been think­ing about this quite a bit, and from the lim­its of my stunt­ed math­e­mat­i­cal knowl­edge, have found that this view sheds new light onto many math­e­mat­i­cal para­dox­es.

  2. Infin­i­ty and zero can not be rep­re­sent­ed abstract­ly or rea­son­ing will fail.

    Why? Sim­ple, if infin­i­ty squared is equal to infin­i­ty then infin­i­ty is either equal to one or zero.

    But because infin­i­ty plus infin­i­ty is equal to infin­i­ty then alge­braical­ly and log­i­cal­ly infin­i­ty must equal zero.

    Though as Har­vey quite right­ly said these two are inverse and yet are equal. They can not exist abstract­ly or phys­i­cal­ly.

    So if some­one asks you a ques­tion with the answer infin­i­ty then say ‘I don’t know and I’m not dumb because you don’t know either’ or say infin­i­ty and say after­wards ‘infin­i­ty is equal to how­ev­er many things it is not equal to’.

  3. I have actu­al­ly came to the same con­clu­sion, (as a joke though), it’s an inter­est­ing thought.

  4. Infin­i­ty is one divid­ed into infin­i­ty. Any­thing infi­nite is part of one.

    Space and time are not real­i­ties in the phe­nom­e­nal world, but the modes under which we per­ceive things apart. They are not infi­nite­ly large nor infi­nite­ly divis­i­ble, but are essen­tial­ly lim­it­ed by the con­tents of our per­cep­tion. Any con­tent of per­cep­tion is all part of one uni­ver­sal encom­pass­ment of space and time.

  5. Glad I’m not the only one who con­sid­ered this a rea­son­able prop­si­tion. Have any smart math­e­mati­cians played around with this idea in a rig­or­ous way?

  6. What makes you think that there is a void out­side the uni­verse? When was it cre­at­ed? It is gen­er­al­ly accept­ed that space was cre­at­ed along with what was to become the lumpy and the shiny bits in the big bang and now it appears to have prop­er­ties. It appears to be expand­ing and have the ener­gy to do so, so it def­i­nite­ly exists but this void you write of when was that made? And what are its prop­er­ties? I think, and I am not alone in this, that you can­not go out­side of our expand­ing uni­verse into your void in a space ship and watch it expand. We are expand­ing into noth­ing and noth­ing does not have an exis­tence. That does make the fron­tier of our Uni­verse a hard place to visu­al­ize, maybe it is some­thing like an Esch­er draw­ing, and that is why I think you have invent­ed a void. The point that you pon­dered regard­ing the par­al­lel uni­vers­es being bound can­not be pos­si­ble they exist unto them selves and not in a place in your invent­ed void. It they were bound in a com­mon void then there would be a com­mon time and that would mean that the mul­ti­verse would have had a begin­ning which it obvi­ous­ly can­not. What came before it? If the mul­ti­verse exists in noth­ing then in a sense it always was because it nev­er began in time. Uni­vers­es pop up and dis­ap­pear utter­ly inde­pen­dent­ly and in no order (time frame). The mul­ti­verse is tru­ly infi­nite and that is why we are here as sen­tinel beings in the right kind of uni­verse with odds that would oth­er­wise be impos­si­ble in any­thing but an infi­nite mul­ti­verse

  7. sor­ry to dis­s­a­point

    but your log­ic has a flaw…

    uni­verse isn’t infi­nite, its expand­ing
    void is abstract, null

    how is the uni­verse expand­ing with no room?

    like try­ing to over fill a baloon in a box, the bal­lon has a lim­it, unless there is room ouside that box, defin­ing the void

    also if you think about it

    log base infin­i­ty of x, is equal to 0

    there­fore infin­i­ty to the zero pow­er is equal to any num­ber

    so they are not abstract, they are nothing(null) and everything(infinite, lit­er­al not math­e­mat­i­cal)

    so any num­ber can be proven. infin­i­ty and zero have an inti­mate con­nect with the num­ber line(or cir­cle if you beleive the ‑infinity=infinity pos­tu­late)

    well then they can be defined, if minor­ly con­vo­lut­ed,

    and if not, well your log­ic still shows flaws

    but nice try, you were close too, but you slipped, I’d tweak your the­o­rm. When you includ­ed the uni­verse into the equa­tion, you got unde­fined, sor­ry

    don’t try to fill a bal­loon with no space

    and don’t try to say a void seper­ates par­ralel uni­vers­es, because then they have a dis­tance, if too big or small to cal­cu­late.

  8. @Sig:  You’re assum­ing Adam is com­par­ing infin­i­ty to zero as found on the num­ber line in mod­ern math­e­mat­ics.  Although I don’t have the time to prop­er­ly rebute your argue­ment (writ­ing a the­sis at the moment), it would be worth one’s time to read the fol­low­ing chap­ter from “Every­thing For­ev­er” by Gevin Gior­bran. 

    http://everythingforever.com/st_math.htm
    http://everythingforever.com/st_math2.htm

    You should quick­ly real­ize the author isn’t apply­ing mod­ern math­e­mat­ics to his argue­ment but rather observ­ing “Sym­met­ri­cal Math­e­mat­ics” which pro­vides more log­ic to his con­clu­sion.  Hope this may also pro­vide res­o­lu­tion to AW’s com­ment as well. 

  9. I’ve got to say, I nev­er expect­ed what was, on my part, some aim­less intel­lec­tu­al noodling while wast­ing time at my old job to gar­ner so many excel­lent com­ments over the last 4 years.

  10. I have also found that zero equals infin­i­ty, even though it sounds like I’m crazy to peo­ple that do not under­stand my think­ing. For exam­ple, the more sides a shape has, the more it looks like a cir­cle. So if a shape had infi­nite sides, it would look exact­ly like a cir­cle. But a cir­cle has no sides, and it has infi­nite sides, so zero would need to equal infin­i­ty. But then again (depend­ing on how you define “side”) a cir­cle could be seen as hav­ing one side, and my the­o­ry would be all wrong.
    Or, if you think of the num­bers on a num­ber line, you could rea­son that half of infin­i­ty is zero, because half of all num­bers are less than zero and half of them are greater than. So, if zero was half of infin­i­ty, zero mul­ti­plied by two would equal infin­i­ty, but it equals zero, so per­haps zero equals infin­i­ty?

  11. P. Carr and Bri­an made real­ly good argu­ments.
    Bri­an’s argu­ment defeat­ed the orig­i­nal posters idea of a void exist­ing out­side the uni­verse.
    And P. Carr made a point that space and time are sim­ply our human way of per­ceiv­ing the world.

    My ques­tion is: Can a moment of our exis­tence be infi­nite­ly divid­ed? and if so does that make death one moment lim­it­ed by our exis­tence?
    In oth­er words, does our nonex­is­tence end where our exis­tence begins?

    my email: isalvadorr@gmail.com

  12. I believe that infin­i­ty and zero are one in the same. Every­thing and noth­ing are the same con­cept. There is no way for noth­ing to exist with­out some­thing. That some­thing would be in turn, be every­thing. If one con­sid­ers every­thing that can pos­si­bly be con­ceived (or not con­ceived) the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less and can­not be divid­ed into dif­fer­ent “things”. Since there is no “things” any­more, noth­ing is achieved (no-things = noth­ing).

    The way I see this, is that the all pos­si­bil­i­ties hap­pen­ing in all the pos­si­ble uni­vers­es dur­ing all pos­si­ble “time” are coex­ist­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly at one instance every­where and nowhere at once. Our per­cep­tion of an indi­vid­ual moment is the puz­zling part.

    An elec­tron has a prob­a­bil­i­ty of being in a cer­tain place at a cer­tain time. It is every­where and no where at the same time. I think our Uni­verse is a very sim­i­lar object as these vir­tu­al­ly mass­less par­ti­cles that make it up.

  13. wow. i’ve main­tained this the­o­ry for years now, it’s nice to see that i’m not the only one who assumes this to be true. the inter­est­ing part about this argu­ment, is how it can be applied math­e­mat­i­cal­ly in the quan­ti­ta­tive sense, and also philo­soph­i­cal­ly in the qual­i­ta­tive sense. as mr. per­ry before me point­ed out, noth­ing = no-thing. i find that both taoist and zen teach­ings point to this as well, the con­cept of no-mind, and to lose the ego is to be one with the ulti­mate. but one thing that i’ve been strug­gling with, if you take this a step further…assuming the uni­verse is infi­nite, and assum­ing that we are indeed all one as physics has shown us, then does infin­i­ty = 1? and there­fore 0 = 1?

  14. yea,but if any mat­ter or any­thing that is here in the uni­verse and is expand­ing at its own rate then u cud go beyond the “phys­i­cal uni­verse” into the void.If stars and dust from rocks can expand out­ward then u cud go as far out as u want,and the void,i wud think, has no prop­er­ties it wud just be open space not filled up yet just like any oth­er free space in the uni­verse.

    and i agree with the infinity=0 stuff,but still pon­der­ing

  15. noth­ing = every­thing. think­ing about infin­i­ty is just as mind-bog­gling as think­ing about nul­li­ty. shit just wraps around itself and indeed 0 = ?. it’s like how the emp­ty set is inside every set, even itself, and it is the same set.

    @wikipedia:[By the prin­ci­ple of exten­sion­al­i­ty, two sets are equal if they have the same ele­ments; there­fore there can be only one set with no ele­ments. Hence there is but one emp­ty set, and we speak of “the emp­ty set” rather than “an emp­ty set.”]

    this emp­ty set is ? or {}. it is in every set because any set has it as a sub­set. it’s like how we can always have zero stuff on us. i have zero mil­lions dol­lars in a bag here next to me.

    @wikipedia:[By the def­i­n­i­tion of sub­set, the emp­ty set is a sub­set of any set A, as every ele­ment x of ? belongs to A. If it is not true that every ele­ment of ? is in A, there must be at least one ele­ment of ? that is not present in A. Since there are no ele­ments of ? at all, there is no ele­ment of ? that is not in A. Hence every ele­ment of ? is in A, and ? is a sub­set of A. Any state­ment that begins “for every ele­ment of ?” is not mak­ing any sub­stan­tive claim; it is a vac­u­ous truth. This is often para­phrased as “every­thing is true of the ele­ments of the emp­ty set.”]

    to noth­ing, all applies, as with every­thing.

    if you are going to talk about every­thing you should go on liv­ing for­ev­er and nev­er ceas­ing to speak of it. or say noth­ing at all; both choic­es are equiv­a­lent but as we can’t talk for­ev­er the lat­ter is the most appro­pri­ate.

    yet, here we are, stub­born­ly try­ing to say some­thing about every­thing 🙂

    and this is also why you can say that ulti­mate­ly noth­ing mat­ters, and you would be right. it’s anoth­er way of say­ing that every sin­gle lit­tle thing mat­ters just as much as any­thing.

  16. I came to this same con­clu­sion sev­er­al years ago when it dawned on me that noth­ing phys­i­cal can be either zero or infi­nite. That it can­not be zero is an obvi­ous truth, but it seems to me that if you put lim­its on infin­i­ty by say­ing that there are infi­nite “Xs” then you have destroyed the true mean­ing of infin­i­ty. How can any­thing infi­nite be parsed?

  17. After think­ing about this con­cept anoth­er idea come to mind. If you take 1 and dev­ide that by 1/2 you get 1/2. If you divide 1 by 1/4 you get 1/4. If the frac­tions were to keep going allthough you would nev­er get to zero you would have an increac­ing­ly large denom­i­na­tor. But get­ting to zero would be some­thing like tan­gents in trig­anom­e­try it would “blow up” hence infin­i­ty being zero. You may find fal­lac­i­es in my think­ing but remem­ber im in 8th grade.

  18. If I can’t show you 0 whoopee cush­ions because once you see one, it’s not zero. Fol­low­ing that log­ic, I can’t show you 1 whoopee cush­ion either. Nor 2, 3, 4, and so on. All num­bers are abstrac­tions, but that does­n’t mean they are equal.

  19. Zero=infinity in that it proves The Big Bang The­o­ry: from noth­ing to eter­ni­ty.

  20. Zero = Waking/life. All sens­es avail­able.

    Infin­i­ty = Sleeping/death. sens­es cease to exist.

    What peo­ple need to real­ize is that as human beings (rather “intel­li­gent life”) we have the abil­i­ty to weave in and out of space and time. Sim­ply mean­ing, that the voice inside of our heads is the nav­i­ga­tor of our bod­ies (the in between of zero and infin­i­ty or bridge between two realms), that deter­mines whether our men­tal ener­gy is being exert­ed in the mate­r­i­al world (what you can sense or bet­ter yet “zero world”) or whether men­tal ener­gy is used to explore whats already inside of our minds (col­lec­tive conscience/dream world or bet­ter yet “infin­i­ty”). Because we have this unique abil­i­ty above all oth­er life­forms, what­ev­er we can imag­ine in our heads thats log­i­cal, can be brought into the realm of zero. We have freewill dur­ing “med­i­ta­tive think­ing”, and will while we live. For exam­ple, James Camerons Avatar. The Natives of Pan­do­ra are this human-like species that have the abil­i­ty to “feel” the ener­gy of every­thing around them, liv­ing in peace and har­mo­ny. WE HUMAN BEINGS are poten­tial­ly this species as long as we believe we can be. Also, same goes for any­one in any sit­u­a­tion. If you want to do some­thing you can do it, any­thing at all, it all is attain­able. The earth has made us per­fect in every­way.. we just have to believe it, and real­ize it. THE VOICE IN OUR HEADS IS CAPABLE OF BEING GODLY.

  21. Hav­ing thought of this ear­li­er today and bring­ing it up to my pre-cal teacher i thought i was first to come up with the thought of infin­i­ty equal­ing zero. This forum is def­i­nite­ly burst­ing my bub­ble! You guys prob­a­bly think im a noob being bare­ly a pre-cal stu­dent, but please dont under­es­ti­mate my log­ic and com­pre­hen­sion of things. I was think­ing of all the pos­si­bil­i­ties to prove this the­o­rem. Some of the thoughts are men­tioned in this forum. I was stumped on a thought though. Can some­one explain to me when talk­ing about domain hav­ing a line start at zero and con­tin­u­ing to infin­i­ty, how this would look if infin­i­ty and zero equaled each oth­er?

  22. If zero equals infinity,(which it does not) does that mean that infin­i­ty over infin­i­ty equals zero. No. But, infin­i­ty is the inverse of zero. They both share the same prop­er­ties, except for over them­selves. Zero over zero equals infin­i­ty, because you can take zero out of zero an infi­nite amount of times.

  23. The dif­fer­ence between infin­i­ty and zero is zero so infin­i­ty. It is a para­dox.

  24. I some­what agree but I think you are com­ing at it from the wrong approach. First of all, this is all the­o­ret­i­cal, so noth­ing we argue can be set in stone until fur­ther proved. If you think about it, every­thing we mea­sure is rel­a­tive. Noth­ing has veloc­i­ty unless com­pared to anoth­er point or object with a dif­fer­ent veloc­i­ty. The same con­cept of rel­a­tiv­i­ty applies to every­thing else as well. If we assume infin­i­ty exists, which we don’t know, it includes all mat­ter and ener­gy and what­not. Infin­i­ty is all exis­tence. If it is all exis­tence, it becomes the stan­dard, the means of com­par­i­son, the con­stant. The zero. If every­thing is mov­ing at an infi­nite veloc­i­ty, then as a means of com­par­i­son, every­thing is mov­ing at zero veloc­i­ty.

  25. From a pure­ly math­e­mat­i­cal view there is a case for infin­i­ty = 0. If we agree that the amount of pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive num­bers is infi­nite, that is, we can con­tin­ue count­ing them for­ev­er and nev­er run out of num­bers to count, then sure­ly this for­mu­la holds true:

    n + (-n) = 0

    Infi­nite pos­i­tive num­bers plus infi­nite neg­a­tive num­bers would be equal to zero in the same way that 1 + (-1) = 0. Infin­i­ty equals noth­ing.

  26. one flaw in your argu­ment is your word­ing of the uni­verse.
    The uni­verse is not expand­ing into any­thing.
    the void is no thing. noth­ing. The void is not infi­nite it is not any­thing to ascribe to it any prop­er­ty makes no sense. There is no space-time out­side of the uni­verse and in fact to say out­side of the uni­verse makes no sense. I’m all for your inter­est in 0 and ifin­i­ty. Keep think­ing.

  27. I’ve been pon­der­ing the same ideas. As we approach infin­i­ty, I believe there is a point of esca­la­tion, we can call it some­thing like an event hori­zon, where the ever increas­ing infin­i­ty becomes the zero of anoth­er dimen­sion, or uni­verse, or time.

    My the­o­ry is that infin­i­ty = 0*, with 0* not being the same as the orig­i­nal 0, but one of high­er (or low­er) lev­el, or ener­gy, or time, or dimen­sion.

    I also pro­pose that any­thing approach­ing infin­i­ty will do so in increas­ing speed as I believe that time is a part of infin­i­ty and one affects the oth­er. By mov­ing towards infin­i­ty, speed increas­es and time becomes so slow that it even­tu­al­ly reach­es this “event hori­zon” at which a whole new time, or uni­verse, or what­ev­er .. is cre­at­ed. It might even stand for the cre­ation of time, life or space in and of itself.

    There are sev­er­al rea­sons why I believe infin­i­ty = 0* (with 0* being dif­fer­ent from 0, or oth­er zeros that can be cre­at­ed). Imag­ine a cir­cle on a piece of paper. There is noth­ing inside this cir­cle, but now you add a dot, and anoth­er, and anoth­er. If you were to add infi­nite num­ber of dots, the whole cir­cle will expand into one big dot itself. And while infin­i­ty here does not equal to the orig­i­nal zero- dot-cir­cle — it does equal to a new start­ing point on a dif­fer­ent lev­el. Time becomes involved, because with infin­i­ty, you also race against time.

    Any­how, I do believe infin­i­ty and zero are key play­ers in the real­i­ty of our uni­verse. How large can some­thing get? And then, how small can some­thing get? Is there real­ly no end on either spec­trum? And what are the impli­ca­tions to infin­i­ty = a new zero?

  28. As you already note, in real life, we don’t find any­thing that is infi­nite, or zero. We imag­ine end­less amounts of stars, but there are not an infi­nite num­ber of stars out there. Even speed seems to be lim­it­ed by that of light. Has there ever been any­thing infi­nite? Small or big – how far can it go?

    And what about zero? I can say I have zero $ in my account. Does this mean I have an infi­nite num­ber of $s in my account? Of course not! But it may mean that you have an infi­nite num­ber of oth­er valu­ables that stand equal for that zero $ in your account.

  29. This is amus­ing. Very amus­ing.
    How about this… Infin­i­ty can be equal to Zero, but not the oth­er way around. [huh?]
    They both have sim­i­lar qual­i­ties, and I do not know if they both exist. i’ve enjoyed read­ing the com­ments here. I will be here again to tell you what I real­ly feel about your thoughts on this mat­ter. I have a few writ­ings on Zero and Infin­i­ty on this web­site http://akorede.konfirmed.com please feel free to drop your com­ments if need be.

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