Infinity

A while ago I wrote a post about Numerology and the affect on our lives that numbers have.  There is another number that I did not mention in the post, it was one that I wanted to save to discuss in detail.  It's not a rational number like 1, 2 and 3 etc, but an irrational number, that means it's precise value can never be stated.  Some even argue it's not a number at all, I'm talking about Infinity.

Infinity is somewhat mystical in its nature.  The concept is simple but complex at the same time.  It is the highest number that can exist, but at the same time it is higher than any number that can exist and higher than that is equal to it.  Therein lies the first paradoxical nature of infinity, part of the reason the infinity symbol itself is often used to represent a paradox - ∞

Infinity + 1 is equal to Infinity and Infinity - 1 is still equal to Infinity.  It is a value that is forever changing and can never be changed.  It is a concept that is easy to state but incredibly hard to actually imagine and conceptualize.  What I find fascinating about this number and the effect it has on our lives is that it is often called upon to explain the unknown.  Whenever we can't give a precise answer to any question we simply use infinity in its place.  When we think of the possible outcomes of a give scenario and their probability, our first instinct when we can't rationalize the number of outcomes is to posit that there are an infinite number.

Whenever we create new concepts that need limitations to explain their boundaries we call upon it again to set a boundary that will be more than we ever need.  Whether we can actually achieve such size and scale is irrelevant as by it's very nature the answer is no that we cannot, for even if we did reach a point named infinity, by its nature you would be able to continue moving beyond it without breaching it.

Still of all the concept persists to explain the limitations of things we can not know the limit of, for example the size of the Universe, something which we can not know due to the limits of our understanding, we simply conclude that the Universe is infinite, and yet ever expanding, however to be ever expanding there needs to be an outer boundary that is increasing and if such a boundary existed then the size of the Universe would not be infinite.

Infinity it seems is simply our way of saying "unknown" - the question is, why don't we just say that, we do we use the concept in an effort to give a definitive answer which is inherently something that cannot be definitive.