Hay un concepto que es el corruptor y el desatinador de los otros. No hablo del Mal cuyo limitado imperio es la ética; hablo del infinito.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Avatares de la tortuga’, in Discusión, Buenos Aires, 1932
Tag Archives: infinite
Greg Egan
Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a ‘machine’ with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.
Greg Egan, Permutation City, London, 1994, p. 286
Peter Suber
The infinite has been a perennial source of mathematical and philosophical wonder, in part because of its enormity—anything that large is grand, and provokes awe and contemplation—and in part because of the paradoxes like Galileo’s. Infinity seems impossible to tame intellectually, and to bring within the confines of human understanding. I will argue, however, that Cantor has tamed it. The good news is that Cantor’s mathematics makes infinity clear and consistent but does nothing to reduce the awe-inspiring grandeur of it.
Peter Suber, ‘Infinite Reflections’, St. John’s Review, vol. 44, no. 2 (1998)