A Trip To Infinity - Netflix

[saac]

I'm hesitating a little putting this up, mindful of the rabbit holes these "infinity" threads can generate. Anyway, I thought this documentary was worthy as it is very watchable and thought provoking. There are the usual suspects, infinite hotel etc but also some less familiar models (to me anyway).  Contributions from some prominent and contemporary mathematicians and physicists; including some input from Carlo Rovelli one of my favourite physics authors.  About 43 minutes in there is a very poetic description of a box from which nothing can enter or escape to demonstrate the consequences of infinite possibilities  - to my mind woo woo physics, but beautiful nonetheless!   Way beyond anything I could even hope to get my around but certainly compelling.  It's on Netflix and is titled A Trip To Infinity, runs for about 80 minutes or so. 

Jim 

[Rusted]

80 minutes is truly infinite.
For those of us with the attention span of a goldfish.

[iantaylor2uk]

I'm quite into maths - it is fairly straightforward to show that the infinity of natural numbers (i.e. integers) is, somewhat surprisingly, the same as the infinity of fractions, and it is also possible to show that the infinity of irrational numbers is a bigger level of infinity. It is also possible to build even greater levels of infinity from these first two levels. One of the biggest questions in maths is whether there is any other infinity between that of the integers and that of the irrationals, which as far as I know is still unknown (it is called the "continuum hypothesis" if you want to do a google search). I'm travelling to London next week so this is something to watch on the train. Thanks for the heads up on the documentary.

[billhinge]

I saw most of it till the end of the entropy example which was good, but it didn't cover all the Hilbert Hotel infinities such as infinite number of infinite buses and finally guests with infinitely long names of 2 letters who couldn't fit in the infinite hotel

 

 

[George Jones]

17 hours ago, saac said:

It's on Netflix and is titled A Trip To Infinity, runs for about 80 minutes or so.

I would love to watch this, but, unfortunately, we don't subscribe to Netflix. I think that my wife, a high school maths teacher, would like to watch it. If we were to watch, my wife likely would force our 16-year-old daughter to watch with us. I think that our daughter would treat it as an 80-minute prison sentence.

 

6 hours ago, iantaylor2uk said:

I'm quite into maths - it is fairly straightforward to show that the infinity of natural numbers (i.e. integers) is, somewhat surprisingly, the same as the infinity of fractions, and it is also possible to show that the infinity of irrational numbers is a bigger level of infinity. It is also possible to build even greater levels of infinity from these first two levels. One of the biggest questions in maths is whether there is any other infinity between that of the integers and that of the irrationals, which as far as I know is still unknown (it is called the "continuum hypothesis" if you want to do a google search). I'm travelling to London next week so this is something to watch on the train. Thanks for the heads up on the documentary.

I love this stuff. A book about this that I love is "Infinity and Mind the science and philosophy of the infinite" by Rudy Rucker. From the preface "Cantor's theory of higher infinities and his discovery of the Continuum Problem remain, at least for this mathematician, The Greatest Story Ever Told.."

[Zermelo]

1 hour ago, George Jones said:

"Infinity and Mind the science and philosophy of the infinite" by Rudy Rucker

An excellent book. Many others have covered the smaller infinities, but his is the only one I've come across that tries to describe some of the large cardinals in a non-technical way.

[leibek]

the universe.......................... will expand infinitely is a  big possibility...........