Quotes About Infinities

Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.

The proponent of concrete universals must also confront the problem of uninstantiated universals. This problem is especially acute for a concretist account of mathematics, since the finite world cannot accommodate the infinities of classical mathematics.

I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist any genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.

At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls.

I'd havenightmares of other islandsstretching away from mine, infinitiesof islands, islands spawning islandslike frogs' eggs turning into polliwogsof islands, knowing that I had to liveon each and every one, eventually,for ages, registering their flora,their fauna, their geography.

Thus passing through the infinite varieties of space we reach the Divine space which is absolutely free from all dimensions and constitutes the meeting point of all infinities.

Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.

'The Infinities' is a shortish book but densely loaded with Nabokovian slyness, gorgeous imagery, and disturbing insights into what it means to be mortal.

The granular discrete structure of space resolves the difficulties of the quantum theory of fields, eliminating the infinities by which it is afflicted.

Artschwager's art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you're looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.

Besides the argument based on the unity of nature, there are problems specific to each theory that call for unification with the other. Each has a problem of infinities. In nature, we have yet to encounter anything measurable that has an infinite value. But in both quantum theory and general relativity, we encounter predictions of physically sensible quantities becoming infinite. This is likely the way that nature punishes impudent theorists who dare to break her unity.

If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory, a theory that answers every question in terms of sensible finite numbers.

but let's emphasize once more here that G. Cantor is, like R. Dedekind, a mathematical Platonist; i.e., he believes that both infinite sets and transfinite numbers really exist, as in metaphysically, and that they are reflected in actual real-world infinities.....

It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form. Some further changes will be needed, just about as drastic as the changes made in passing from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. Some day a new quantum mechanics, a relativistic one, will be discovered, in which we will not have these infinities occurring at all. It might very well be that the new quantum mechanics will have determinism in the way that Einstein wanted.