Perfection:
Well, I’m { __/ } for nothing.
… . . . . . . ./
Does everything include nothing?
Yes and No.
auraseer: what you said:
“Zero is the number you get when you count the number of things contained in nothing.”
= what i said: “thats why mathematically speaking, nothing = 0;”
and {0} contains one element, but so does {8} etc. its what that element is that counts.
another thing… how far is infinite?
considering the only thing we know is infinite is a circle{0}
bj0rn
bj0rn,
You wrote:
No. AuraSeer is right. You are confusing sets with values. You think that because you have zero apples in a basket and the basket obviously contains nothing, that zero and nothing are synomymous. This is incorrect.
To demonstrate why, I’m going to make some substitutions to the apple-basket model. Instead of a basket, let’s assume we have a sphere and instead of apples, let’s assume we’re talking about electrons. This allows us to talk about the charge on the sphere as being in terms of both negative and positive. It’s very hard to visualize negative apples in a basket… OK, so let’s say that the natural (empty) state of our sphere is when there is no charge. If we add an electron, the charge on the sphere goes slightly positive. If instead, we removed an electron, the charge on the sphere goes negative. Are you with me so far? At this point, I’ve not changed the apple-basket model too radically, I’ve just allowed for negative appples, since in the real world, we do have negative things. By your definition, I think you would still call the state of the sphere with zero charge the same as nothing (with respect to charge) on the sphere. However, we arbitrarily assigned zero charge on the sphere to be it’s natural state - in real life, things don’t always baseline to zero. If I had said that the “empty” state of the sphere is when the charge is -10, then you have to add electrons to the sphere to reach a charge of zero. Or said another way, in this case -10 is “nothing” and zero is more than “nothing”.
Nothingness is a state, zero is a value. Hopefully that’s clear and easy to follow.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to demonstrate about a circle??? However there are many things in the real world that have infinite properties about them. The square root of 2, the number pi, 1/3, etc. all have an infinite number of digits on the right side of the decimal point, for instance.
Of course, the charge on an electron is negative, but aside from that, your example holds. =)
Powers
Joey, a circle is often symbolic of eternity because it does not end, an has an infinite number of sides. (Inside and outside, hahaha, I know.) You can’t draw an infinitely long line, so you draw a circle or a sidways 8. Wherever you start, when you get to the end, it’s the beginning, so you have to start over. Infinity.
I just thought of something. Circle might be used as a zero because when you draw it, you don’t put anything inside it. It is a literal picture of the empty set, of nothing. I never did understand how an eternity symbol got to mean zero. Wow!!
possibly the world’s only naive cynic
Space is filled with nothingness
and birds fly upon thin air.
Don’t concern yourself with impossibilities,
don’t concern yourself unless no one’s there.
What has been said about nothingness so far is good. But. Nothingness is everywhere. It is between the buildings on the way to work. It is hiding on the floor below the library, just out of sight. It is between your cells, between the atoms and the smaller things.
Space is filled with nothingness, and something more. And where nothing exists, something can also exist. It paves the way, one may think.
Now that that’s clear as mud…(cause if dirt were clear, mud would be too.)
Isn’t the sphere the more perfect model of infinity?
Even if it isn’t, a hypothetical situation should stir the puddle well.
If I were twenty feet from a phone booth, and I closed half the distance, ten feet, then another half, five, then two and a half, and so on, always moving in halves, I’d never reach the phone booth.
Simple deduction.
Yet, from past experience we find the obvious fault in this situation. In real life, we will make it to the phone booth. Even though the logic says other wise.
So, where does the system fail?
Lets go over this again. If you have a friend hold their hand eight inches from your face, and he moves it half way, and half way, will you feel it when they contact you? Then you touched. Despite the logic.
Here’s the tricky part. Can you remember the pressure of their touch? Then you’re still touching! In an abstract sense, anyway.
Consider this:
If you divide that eight inches in half, and divide the result in half, and so on, the pattern will continue itself infinitely. Thus, at some point, you were one divided by infinity inches away from his hand. You two were infinitely far away, at your closest point. So how far away were you when he pulled his hand back? Was it farther than infinitely? Then your still touching. At least, you did touch, and your as far away now as you were then. In essence, the same distance, anyway.
There is a bit of a skip there, as I say you were 1/infinity inches away, and then claim that is the same distance as an infinite number of inches would be. But this seems a comfortable case of extremes.
All this assuming that infinity is real, and that we experience it daily.
Clear as mud, neh?
“And this, too, was truth.”
–Frank Herbert, Dune 65
Allen,
I agree about the sphere being a better model of infinity. A circle has an infinite number of points and diameters, take any one of it’s infinite number of diameters, and rotate the circle around it, you get a sphere. Now, you also have an infinite number of planes intersecting the center, in each of which you have a circle.
Guess, what… take any one plane and start imagining planes parallel to it, like pages in a book. You will have an infinite number of different sized circles(ok, two of each size, but an infinite number of sizes), each of which can be made into a sphere which fits into your origional sphere perfectly.
The phonebooth example, IMHO, breaks down because the theory behind it describes the person and the booth as points. They aren’t points, they actually take up space. Two points don’t meet until they are exactly in the same place at the same time. Two objects meet when they are touching. Even if you draw lines at half of half of half, etc. instead of having a person walk the marks take up space. (For example, a typical ball point pen makes a mark 1/(32) of an inch wide.) Bottom line, in real life I ignore differences to minute to measure, and I assume everyone else does. Any experiment is subject to the limitations of measurement as well as the theory it’s designed to test.
Your tricky part is indeed confusing, as I don’t quite understand why one infinity has to be the same as another. I consider infinitely large and infinitely small to be different ideas, and those to be diferent from things like pi and sqrt(2) that are always between two finite numbers, but can’t be discribed by any of them exactly. Is this some error I picked up? Is there a mathematician who can explain it to me?
ok, lets see now… why did i say a circle was the only thing we knew to be infinite, because we can see it…we know for a fact that lots of other mathmatical things are infinite. also that about the elements ({0} and those things) i was mearly trying to say that you couldnt use this method in this puzzle here.
sphere, i think, is not the best way to describe infinity. you can be inside the sphere, or outside it…although a sphere is just a 3d circle(0). considering the 3d world, what is infinite in that?? the universe? if the universe isnt infinite, nothing can be.
originally, i meant to ask if we can see infinity, i just wanted you to talk about it a bit first. i think i can see infinitely far away. meaning, things far far away are there even if i dont see them, they are just not visible enough to be seen(yes, silly concept). but if those things were to make themselves visible enough, i would see them. thus proving i could see that far…and further. its all a question of light.
This debate, believe it or not, was originally held by the Pre-Socratic Greeks way back when, and led Democritus to his belief that the world is made up of atoms. The debate went something like this:
Parmenides decided nothing couldn’t exist. His reasoning went as follows: if you try to think of nothing you will fail, because every time you think, no matter what, you are thinking of something. Since the Greeks took it as a given that if the mind can’t know it, it can’t exist, he had them. Nothing simply couldn’t exist. Therefore, the world was an illusion. Why? Well, obviously, without a nothing, movement becomes impossible. You can’t get there from here. You can’t see to there because there’s no nothing to see through. Etc, etc.
Zeno’s paradoxes, the ones about being unable to get to the door without reaching half the distance, and being unable to get to half the distance without getting to half that distance, were meant to prove Parmenides correct. The mathematics was impeccable, and had them stumped.
Democritus figured that if you could fill the world with discrete Parminedean solids, you could fill the world with an uncountably large but still finite number of points, a point beyond which you could divide no further. This was his answer to Zeno, and he called his concept atoms - Greek for indivisible ones. Each was a Parminedean solid on a very small scale, and if you took all of them together, you got the world.
Which means not only that everything includes nothing, but that everything must necessarily include nothing, or you wind up thinking that the world is an illusion, that life is an illusion.
pantom: quite good…we cant argue with that. but permenides said nothing exists, didnt he? zeno on the other hand is saying atoms are nothing(being invisible, they dont exist)but now we have seen them, every day we see them, we know what they are, and therefore we can touch them. we also know that atoms are made of something (cant remember the names, but i know they are there), so what zeno is saying is no longer true. but basically what hes saying is true. what we dont know exist is nothing, until we find it, so what exist… but we havent found, is nothing! (well, as far as we know).
but is this right thinking? denying existance because we dont know what it is or if it exists? its of course difficult to think like that, we can never know if we have discovered everything possible…or can we?
well, keep up the good work 
it makes the world a better place to live in.
bj0rn,
Atom meant indivisible NOT invisible… though, we know today that atoms are indeed divisible…
I Loved that Monie “THe indivisible Man”
Of course, we now know that man is indeed divisible.
Let us remove everything from the giant garage that is our universe, shall we? OK, our universe, which formerly contained clusters of galaxies and whatnot, now contains nothing.
But wait, you might be thinking, this isn’t really so; this Ahunter3 dude has led us to consider it as a hypothetical case, so we’re visualizing the universe as empty, but the empty universe doesn’t exist except in our imaginations (the real one still contains things like computer monitors and interstellar dust clouds, etc). OK, fair enough…
But if we really (somehow) did it, somehow, really emptied the universe so that it contained nothing, in what meaningful ways would that universe then be different from the hypothetical one that you entertained in your mind at my suggestion? Is there any difference between a hypothetical universe containing nothing and a real universe containing nothing?
Designated Optional Signature at Bottom of Post
Well, nothing from nothing leaves nothing.
But ya gotta have something, if you want to believe in me.
No, bjorn, Parmenides never did say that nothing (or more properly nothingness, I guess) existed. The lynchpin of his argument was that nothing couldn’t exist. Behind that, he was basing it all on the Greek idea that the mind could know everything, so if there was something - like nothing - it couldn’t really know, that something couldn’t exist. This was an extreme form of rationalism, as opposed to the empiricism of modern science (do an experiment, see what the results are, modify your theory, design another experiment to test that, etc.).
Atoms, of course, are made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons, to begin with. Below all of these particles, allegedly, are quarks which are supposed to have “charm”, if I remember my physics correctly… A far cry, anyway, from Democritus’ solid, indivisible particles.
Ahunter3: good question. Also, inherently unknowable, eh? After all, if you somehow managed to get yourself into a real universe that contained nothing, it would no longer contain nothing, would it?
sorry about that, my bad.
so zeno just “made up” atoms(well he was right, in a way).
what is nothing i think we have to ask ourselves. is it the absence of something?
it isnt a mathematical concept, we have figured that much out, although it has a mathematical likeness in 0.
have you read terry pratchett? i think it was the book guards, guards… well it was one of those books anyway. detritius(something like that)wrote down every number in the world, but was interupted before he could write that thing after =. well considering it was every number in the world it must be like this: “every * number / in + the - world” = 0. if you dont get zero you havent written down every number in the world. so if 0 is a mathimatical likeness of nothing, everything in the world put together must be = nothing. proven by the garage theory. you put everything in the garage, how many things? everything, well lets do this mathematically, everything - everything = 0. if you have 4 apples, then you eat em all(with the core, for you sarcastic beings), what do you have left? you dont say zero, you say nothing.
something for ponder
bj0rn
There was an important job to be done, and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
bjOrn, Uh, no…Detritus was writing down every number, rather he was defining himself in mathmatical terms…Read it again and you will notice that it is implied that the equal sign was pointing where he was sitting. The other way you can interpret it is that he was calculating a theory of everything, but not writing down everything, there is a difference. And the book in question is Men at Arms.
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
—The dragon observes
doesnt really matter, calculating the theory of everything or writing down everything.
so i didnt recall exacly what he was doing, but it still doesnt change the fact that if you write down everything you get = 0.
the theory of everything = detritius, is correct, but only for him. if you were to do that, it would be everything = you. meaning that if you werent where you are everthing = nothing, but since there are alot of other things to be equal to everything (natually it can be reversed, you = everything, simple mathematical fact). that further proves that everything is more of an opposite to nothing that something is. cause something - something != nothing. (for those who havent seen this : !=, it stands for “not equal to”)
and further down along this line, why wasnt there year 0? mathematically speaking, year nothing(dont take this mathematical statement seriously).
bj0rn