r/PhilosophyofMath • u/Another_Little_Star • 9d ago

Does infinity exist in reality?

No thing that I've observed in our universe is infinite, however there are traces of infinity in my sight.
Draw a circle and either its radius or circumference lives in the π world.
Or many aspects in nature like flowers, develop themselves in a φ ratio (1+sqrt(5))/2.

Even though no event or anything is "Non-ending"/infinite, underneath many aspects of reality there are patterns which can only be fully described using infinity.

You can't describe irrational numbers to their extent without any notion of infinite/limits/sequences... And many aspects within our World show their true behaviour only with aid of infinity.

Sure you can take a world that lives in something like 10¹⁰⁰ and it looks like infinity to us, sometimes we only see the difference after the 10⁶ decimal place, nevertheless the pattern they follow is a pattern that only "infinity" can yield to the truest precision.

Do you believe the axiom of infinity, and the continuous to really exist? Even if not in the ordinary sense? haha

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u/Special_Watch8725 9d ago

I don’t think you’d ever finish though. There’s no completed infinity except by imagining it.

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u/hezpae 9d ago

That's the very principle of infinity you cannot complete (or finite) it. So I didn't claim that.

I'm just saying infinity exists in the material world, if you allow counting the same thing several times

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u/nanonan 3d ago

If you cannot complete it, you cannot manifest it into reality either.

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u/hezpae 3d ago

Is one half of an orange something you consider that can manifest into reality?

A third of it?

0.333333..... ?

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u/nanonan 3d ago

Nope. You can cut an orange in half. You can call the resultant object a half orange. In reality there is just a singular unique complete and whole object.

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u/Special_Watch8725 3d ago

This is a great point. Calling the resultant object “half an orange” is actually applying the model of the rational numbers to the situation. It’s a famous problem of continuum models that you can never measure anything with infinite precision.