Did you know it is impossible to prove the universe is endless? We are blocked by how far we are able to see. The universe has to be endless, but the inability to see that distance due to the speed of light and the believed age of the universe.
Now, our universe’s energy “might” have a limit, but the space it exists would have to be endless because what would be at the edge and beyond it?
But with numbers, it’s relatively easy to prove numbers are endless. There is always a next number.
3 of the largest named numbers are:
A googol. A 1 with 100 0’s (technically that’s 10 of a number with a 99 zeros after it)
A centillian. A 1 followed by 303 zeros.
Then the googolplex. A 1 followed by a googol worth of zeros. A number so large it would require the entire visible universe to write the number out. There arent even enough atoms in the visible universe to reach that number if you tried counting. The visible universe being 96.4 billion light years across.
But what is a 1 with a googolplex worth of 0’s? Or a 1 with that number of 0’s and so forth. And then on and on and on.
And no matter how many times you do that, if you were to draw a graph from 0-infinity it would look like this:
0|——————>infinity
^ your number
You could never progress towards infinity because it is something you could never reach. The largest number any human could possibly conceive of is still closer to 0 than infinity.
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Start reading about Aleph Naught and your brain will melt.
Also, consider Graham’s Number . . . and your brain will melt.
Hilbert’s Hotel will make a pretzel out of what was once your brain.
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What if all you see out there is just a veil and we are all under it?
What if on the other side of the veil we will see the end from the beginning?
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I will look those up. My nerd brain enjoys stuff that’s weird
Also, I’ve had that thought too. What if the universe is just a big endless circle that just circles back on itself. A Möbius loop
I stop once we use letters for numbers
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You can also prove that the natural numbers aren’t bounded above by successive squaring. Squaring a natural number always results in a natural number. 2^2 = 4, 4^2 = 16, 256, 65536, and so on.
There will always be a (positive integer) power of 2 larger than any natural number, and such a number is a natural number, which contradicts the idea that there can be a finite upper bound to the set of natural numbers.
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When the term googolplex was invented, it was “a 1 with as many zeros you could write until you get bored”.
Wasn’t until later it was changed to a specific amount of zeros
If you want to talk big numbers check out Tree(3). It’s a number so large that its bigger than the number of plank volumes in the observable universe. It’s in fact so large there are more digits in the number of digits of tree(3) than plank volumes in the universe.
Also, infinity isn’t a number. It’s not a quantity, it’s a concept.
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Yeah. Infinity is just a term. Just something for us to use to represent a concept.
Can we go beyond infinity? Is that the multi verse?
To infinity… and Beyond!!
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