Q&A: Infinity
Infinity
Question
I assume you’ve been asked this a lot, but still—there’s no one more suitable than you to answer this, both as a philosopher and as a physicist.
What do you think of the purported proof that the world was created: namely, that if the world had always existed, then it would have existed for an infinite amount of time before now, and automatically we could never have reached this moment, because there would have been infinitely many moments before it—so how did we get to this moment?
I don’t know how to refute it, but my “mind’s eye” tells me it’s nonsense.
Answer
Your mind’s eye is right. This is a mathematical misunderstanding, as though one could define a process that starts at the point of negative infinity and moves rightward. There is no such point, and that process is not defined. I’ve answered this in the past here on the site. You can try searching for it.
Discussion on Answer
Who talked about a paradox? It’s simply not defined. The words “to progress from negative infinity up to us” have no meaning.
But just out of curiosity, I’d like to understand this better.
There can’t be an infinity with points in time that you eventually reach, because it isn’t static—it progresses, and we’re at a point in time within the infinity of time that may exist. So where exactly is the paradox?