by Chris Bodenner
A reader sends the above image and writes:
Now you're incorporating a) comics and b) dreams into this thread on infinity, which means you are now obligated to include the final scene of Neil Gaiman's Sandman Issue #1, in which the hero's revenge is infinity itself: Endless Waking. Gaiman makes the bad guy have nightmares that he keeps "waking up" from … into a new nightmare. Forever. Now that's rough.
Another points to a famous Mad cover illustrating infinity. Another writes:
Though I hesitate at all to connect torture and humor, given the recent discussion on infinity and this blog's many discussions of torture, I just want to note that Douglas Adams conceived of the Total Perspective Vortex, a device that gives just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot that says, "You are here". It is reputed to be the most horrible torture device ever created.
Another:
I've always liked James Joyce's description of eternity in A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man:
For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.
Another:
Like your reader, I too have become overwhelmed with absolute terror when contemplating infinity. When I first started college, I thought I'd be a physics major. But as the physics (and required math) for that major started increasingly delving into the topic of infinity, I simply started to freak out. It invaded my dreams and my conscious thoughts in a way that filled me with a terror I can't describe. It forced me to switch majors just to save my own sanity.
But more than that, it made me feel so helplessly small and meaningless. I hear that some find meaning in religion, but the myths and tales I heard on that subject paled at the power of infinity. Contemplating infinity made the ideas in religious texts seem quaint and small by comparison. Plus, whenever I started thinking about an everlasting afterlife, I'd just get freaked out about the endless nature of it! Oddly, what finally gave me comfort was the knowledge that I was mortal and that I'd one day die – that there was a finite end to it all. Whereas most people probably find peace in the concept of an infinite afterlife to get over their fear of death, for me, it was finding a peace in the concept of death that got me over my fear of infinity.
A more optimistic view:
I've never really had any problem with infinity. Why? Because if the universe is infinite, then I am by definition the center of the universe. Any direction I point, you can travel an infinite distance. I might be small and insignificant compared to the rest of the universe, but knowing I'm the center makes everything OK.
P.S. This also means you are also the center of the universe ;)
The Dish 