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I bought a book last year from a Borg store. It was priced right and on a subject I had an interest in that week. The book was about the concept of infinity. I always wondered about infinity because it is nothing I could really comprehend, or define. For me infinity has always been like electricity. Everyone agrees electricity exists. I know what it feels like to be shocked, but electricity is too abstract for me because I can not pick it up and set it back down.

Infinity is like for me to. Infinity reminds me of when I was a child and I would break thermometers to play with that little drop of mercury they held inside. I would hold that little silver drop in the palm of my hand, and watch it move around and conform to the bends in my hand. It would roll this way and that, but after a few minutes most of it had rolled to the floor, never to be seen again. Infinity is sort of like that, in that you can start thinking about it, try to define it, but after a few minutes infinity sort of slips away, and you realize you are thinking about something else.

In the past, according to the book, people were scared of the concept of infinity and even today many serious mathematicians do not play in the arena of infinity. Many mathematicians found it too easy to go past a point of no return and get lost. Going on my limited experience from trying to imagine thinking about infinity I can understand how it could happen. As I read the book, which was not by any means a best seller, I would have to it it down as I have my limit of how much I can absorb at one sitting, and with infinity that appears to be a small amount.

One of the most descriptive explanations of infinity I read was not credited with a source. It was an explanation about a hotel with infinite amount of rooms. I found this link although you will need some time to read it, it is a good read. It is an explanation made into a story about Hotel Infinity. Hotel Infinity makes a complex idea pretty simple to understand even though it ends on a sad note.

After I finished the book, I had a better understanding of how thinking of infinity came about, and how it is just beyond us to comprehend something that has no end. I made a little game for myself. It made it clear to me how mathematicians get wrapped up in infinity and never come back again, and why it causes some apprehension in some people who must work with infinity. I thought of the number two written in the sky. It took a few seconds before I could see it in my mind. The number two floating in the sun. Then I multiplied the number two by two. Again I could see the number four floating in the sun. I did this a few more times, but of course by now the numbers are big and I really had no guess what they were, only how large they were. I kept writing these long numbers up in the sky and making them almost twice as long each time I multiplied by two.

Eventually the numbers stretched from one side of the horizon to the other, and there was no place to write them and more. At first I was confuse as to how to keep imagining infinity, but then I thought all I need was to change my perspective of where I viewed the numbers from. I started looking at the numbers from space and there was lots of room to fit them all. Well, they were getting really long each time, so large I could not see from one end to another, so I imagined standing even farther out in space. When I finally stopped with the numbers everything I could imagine every star, planet, and any other object in the universe was a tiny spec of light, so far away, it was hard to see. Yet the numbers kept writing themselves out across the emptiness. I knew at this point, I was still only just getting started, and already it was time for me to quit. It felt as if I were really some unknown billions and billions of light years from where I had been sitting on the couch. Shrinking the numbers back on their way to the number two was quite an experience. It really felt as if I was traveling, moving at an incredible speed back to my little spot on the couch.

I knew at that moment how it happened when mathematicians get lost in their thoughts never to return. I had experienced just a sliver of what they must feel and think when they are doing high level symbolic math out on the edge. Getting so wrapped up in something that over time they are so far away from everyday life that they never manage to find their way back home. I am not a math whiz, or even anything close to it. I put this into something I could relate to on an everyday level because having discussions about infinity just does not happen very often and the concept is interesting and flows into all aspects of our lives no matter what we may believe.

I wonder if something similar happens when people just quit. Whether people quit from stress, trauma, or something else that makes them simply check out of their life. I am thinking the process is all the same. That is a think I can relate to, because it could by me or anyone I know who one day just quits. How terrible it sounds to us, to think of someone who has no response to anything. It must be a terrifying hell for someone who has been a part of something so terrible they quit. For someone like a digit head who does the same thing, I wonder if they feel like they are on a wonderful trip, or do they hit a point where they no longer are? Maybe for someone who gets lost in infinity, it is not too bad? For them life never stopped, their life just changed a few levels of reality?

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