Creation ex nihilo

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Skarp</i>
You are misinterpreting my understanding of infinity. I'm giving Meta Model the benifit of the doubt, and playing that game, which leads me to nothing. My mind is pefectly capable of imagining the Meta Model. Apparently I took it farther than your imagination was willing to go.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I will have to take your word for it since however thorough your understanding of infinities and the MM may be, your ability to demonstrate your understanding without calling it into question is severely deficient.

JR

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Skarp</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">You are not making any sense. Just as you cannot iteratively add the series 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 ... to the final sum of 2, you cannot iteratively divide particles infinitely and ever stop doing so. You will never have nothing left to divide, even after infinite divisions just as you will never find the last term in the series. That is what infinite means. But just as the number 2 is finite even though it is infinitely divisible, so too the finite particle.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">So I take it that you agree to disagree with Tom then, as he states.

{I’m crossing a street of width 2. I first cross half way, then half the remaining way, and so on forever. The corresponding series in a one-to-one correspondence with my steps is 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …, which sums to exactly 2, the width of the street. There are an infinite number of steps or intervals, yet a finite sum, and I can in fact cross the street.}

This is the same type of analogy by which we reach a zero distance to travel, when that infinity of steps is complete.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I have expressed to Tom in the past that his use of the infinite series in trying to explain MM concepts is problematic and can be a cause of confusion since there are no potential infinities in MM. His use of the series implies that moving from point A to point B is akin to adding the terms of the series, but this is not so. To the extent that you have applied Tom's illustration more thoroughly than it deserved, I can understand that there would be some confusion and a certain amount of talking past each other.

JR

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Skarp</i>
<br />Apparently you haven't been reading my post's, because that is one of my main points toward a composition of nothing.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I don't think any of us are getting your point, and are all just guessing where you are hung up.

In MM, after you have gone down in scale by a factor of a googleplex (an unimaginably large number), and you stop there and look around, you see essentially the same kind of universe as you see at our scale, differing only in the details. And you still have an infinitely great way to go.

Your mind isn't letting you treat infinity as literally unbounded. You keep suggesting that it leads to a smallest particle. But the "distance" between the smallest particle you can imagine and infinitesimal is still infinite, just as the speed of gravity (at least 20 billion times the speed of light) is no closer to infinite speed than a snail's pace.

Keep going back to the integer analogy or the infinite series analogy, which ever is appropriate. All integers and all scales are finite. Yet the set of all integers and the set of all scales are both infinite.

Here's one more angle to approach this. As you go down in scale, you are not getting any closer to a fundamental particle or building block, or any closer to an origin, or any closer to anything other than the next scale down. There is no evolution (meaning progressive change, as opposed to cyclic change) in scale, just as there is none (overall) in space or time. So you cannot get closer to a "smallest possible particle" because none exists, in the same way that a googleplex is no closer to infinity than is any other integer. -|Tom|-

I need to cross a distance of 1 pace. Can I succeed?

*** An alternate way to think about it. ***

===

I close my eyes and step slowly into the unknown ...
I cross the first 1/2 of the distance (1/2 pace) in 1 second.
I cross the second 1/2 (another 1/2 p) in 1 second. (p is the abreviation for pace)
I am done. But how?

===

While I'm crossing the second 1/2 p, I also -

cross the first 1/2 of the second 1/2 p (the third 1/4 p), in 0.5 second.
cross the first 1/2 of the third 1/4 p (the fifth 1/8 p), in 0.25 second.
cross the first 1/2 of the fifth 1/8 p (the ninth 1/16 p), in 0.125 second.
cross the first 1/2 of the ninth 1/16 p (the seventeenth 1/32 p), in 0.0625 second.

... and so on.

The distance covered at each step in the process is smaller.
The time needed for each step is also smaller, by the same proportion.

My speed at each step is constant, 1/2 p/sec. Not only can I succeed, I can go on to cross a second pace, if I choose.

LB

I need to cross a distance of 1 pace. Can I succeed?

*** An(other) alternate way to think about it. ***

===

I pretend that I need to cross a distance of 2 paces
I cross the first 1/2 of the distance (1 pace) in 2 seconds.
I am done.

I mis-attributed a quote, and want to "get it right" without removing the main part of the post. I hope this works.

===

<s>[tvf, to Skarp] "I don't think any of us are getting your point, and are all just guessing where you are hung up. "</s>

<s>[Skarp]</s> [JR] "I have expressed to Tom in the past that his use of the infinite series in trying to explain MM concepts is problematic and can be a cause of confusion ... "

Could it be that <s>he is</s> you are experiencing (or did at one time experience) the confusion <s>he worries</s> you worry about above, and <s>is</s> are just trying to save others from it?

No single explanation for just about anything is going to work for everyone. And the more exotic a concept is, the fewer people are going to be satisfied by any given explanation.

You should rest easy, <s>Skarp</s> JR. Most of us seem to have no confusion about this.