Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
You are welcome to analyze it and interpret it as you will. I love it myself as do many others. 
You need to embrace the poet in you methinks. 
If that doesn't work think of bigger infinities.   |
Fair 'nuff Kenny.
(By the way, thanks for the black hole story. I hadn't seen it yet. Fascinating!)
As a piece of poetry, it is quite impressive. Of course, meaning is not a necessary part of poetry
.
That's the only aspect I was criticizing
.
By the way, I've since reconsidered my (harsh) position. I could actually agree to some extent with Haldane - but only if I used some italics thus:
Quote:
|
"Not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine...."
|
That should satisfy us both eh?
I'm quite willing to admit the limits of my own imagination, but I've seen too many bonafide geniuses in my life to feel pessimistic about humanity's ability to someday understand it
all.
As for bigger infinities, I agree
. In fact, Cantor's transfinite numbers were part of the inspiration for me to embrace science as a profession (I suspect that's what you had in mind
).
Apropos of nothing (just a random thought) - have you seen the visual proof for why the
cardinality of real numbers is greater than that of the natural numbers? Probably one of the most profound things I've encountered in my entire life. Popped my intellectual cherry on that one
. The fact that you could
prove such a seemingly metaphysical statement was what charmed me so much.
That's also the day that philosophers and mystics who harped on about infinity ceased to impress me - because I could see that they had all missed saying anything
substantial about it. It was a mathematician who finally tamed infinity and changed it from mystical nonsense into rigorous mathematics you could touch with your mind - the Prometheus of our time.
Ages later, I leaned that some very important theorems in Fourier analysis rely on this strange fact. In fact, anytime people use infinite polynomial expansions to solve differential equations (and declare Linear Independence - a diff.eq. in-joke - my apologies
), they are making use of this exotic (almost philosophical) statement about numbers - that never ceases to amaze me
.