• Question: How do you explain the concept of the infinity really?

    Asked by Currete_cr_13 to Annette, Dave, Jaine, Julio, Mike on 14 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Jaine Blayney

      Jaine Blayney answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      Hilbert’s paradox: Imagine an hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all of which are occupied.

      If a new guest arrives and wishes to be accommodated in the hotel, we can move the guest currently in room 1 to room 2, the guest currently in room 2 to room 3, and so on, moving every guest from their current room n to room n+1 (remember that infinity = infinity+1). After this, room 1 is empty and the new guest can be moved into that room.
      (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel)

    • Photo: Annette Neill

      Annette Neill answered on 16 Nov 2016:

      Well I think it as there never being an end to a process… like if you imagine you could take off into the night sky, where would you end up? I’ve seen lots of good examples of explaining it but the best was this-take an A4 paper and fold it in half, continue to fold it,over and over again-when will the process end???

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