this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
289 points (86.2% liked)

memes

9899 readers
3198 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
289
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/memes
 

I considered deleting the post, but this seems more cowardly than just admitting I was wrong. But TIL something!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Try thinking of it like this: If I have an infinite amount of feathers, I can balance a scale that has any number of bowling balls on it. Even if there was an infinite number of bowling balls on the other side, I could still balance it because I also have infinite feathers that I can keep adding until it balances. I don't need MORE than infinite feathers just because there's infinite bowling balls. In the same way if my scale had every rational number on one side I could add enough even numbers to the other side to make it balance, but if I had all the irrational numbers on one side of the scale then I would never have enough rational numbers to make it balance out even though they are also infinite.

Edit: I suppose the easiest explaination is that it's already paradoxical to even talk about having an infinite number of objects in reality just like it would be paradoxical to talk about having a negative number of objects. Which weighs more, -5 feathers that weigh 1 gram each or -5 bowling balls that weigh 7000 grams each? Math tells us in this case that the feathers now weigh more than the bowling balls even though we have the same amount of each and each bowling ball weighs more than each feather. In reality we can't have less than zero of either.