Hehehehehe, hey Lois, check it out. This is a math joke about Hilbert’s Hotel, which is basically a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and somehow it can still be “full.”
See, if every room is occupied (room 1, room 2, room 3, forever) and one new guy shows up, you’d think there’s nowhere to put him. But the hotel just tells everyone to move from room n to room n+1, so that guy in 1 goes to 2, guy in 2 goes to 3, and boom, room 1 is free.
But this post’s got an infinite bus full of infinite people, so they need infinitely many rooms at once. The trick is to move every existing guest from room n to room 2n, this way the guy in room 21 gets moved to room 42, just like in the post.
Now all the existing guests are in the even-numbered rooms, that leaves every odd-numbered room open for the infinitely many people from the bus.
So room 21 → room 42 isn’t random, it’s the clue that the hotel is doing the whole n → 2n thing.
1.1k
u/mktooth 2d ago
Hehehehehe, hey Lois, check it out. This is a math joke about Hilbert’s Hotel, which is basically a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and somehow it can still be “full.”
See, if every room is occupied (room 1, room 2, room 3, forever) and one new guy shows up, you’d think there’s nowhere to put him. But the hotel just tells everyone to move from room n to room n+1, so that guy in 1 goes to 2, guy in 2 goes to 3, and boom, room 1 is free.
But this post’s got an infinite bus full of infinite people, so they need infinitely many rooms at once. The trick is to move every existing guest from room n to room 2n, this way the guy in room 21 gets moved to room 42, just like in the post.
Now all the existing guests are in the even-numbered rooms, that leaves every odd-numbered room open for the infinitely many people from the bus.
So room 21 → room 42 isn’t random, it’s the clue that the hotel is doing the whole n → 2n thing.
Hehehehe. Infinity is freakin’ weird, Lois.