The Infinite Book

Table Of Contents

Preface

1 Much Ado about Everything
The Rough Guide to Infinity
Intimations of the Infinite
Zeno Hour

2 Infinity, Almost and Actual, Fictitious and Factual
Darkness at Noon
A Purely Aristotelian Relationship
Infinity and God
A Little Kant

3 Welcome to the Hotel Infinity
Hotels
Experiences of the Hotel Infinity
The Hotel Infinity’s Accounts

4 Infinity Is Not a Big Number
An Immaculate Misconception
Albert of Saxony’s Paradox
Galileo’s Paradox
Cadmus and Harmonia
Terminator 0, 1⁄2, and 1
Countable Infinities
Uncountable Infinities
The Towering Infinito

5 The Madness of Georg Cantor
Cantor and Son
The Chronicle of Kronecker
Cantor, God, and Infinity – the Trinity with Affinity
All’s Sad that Ends Bad

6 Infinity Comes in Three Flavours
Triple Top
Let’s Get Physical
Naked Infinities
The Great Blue Yonder
Infinity on the Back Foot

7 Is the Universe Infinite?
Everything That Is
Cosmology Goes Underground
Bent Universes
The Problem of Topology
The Problem of Uniformity
The Problem of Acceleration
Where Does This Leave Us?
The Shining

8 The Infinite Replication Paradox
A Universe Where Nothing Is Original
The Great Escape
The Temporal Version – Been There, Done That
The Never-ending Story
The Ethics of the Infinite

9 Worlds Without End
Other Worlds in History
Out of This World
Inflation – Here, There, and Everywhere
Conscious Interventions – Men in Black
Simulated Universes
How Should We Then Live?

10 Making Infinity Machines
Super-tasks
Rubbing Thomson’s Lamp
Some Norse Code
The End-game Problem
Relativity and the Amazing Shrinking Man
A Matter of Timing
Newtonian Super-tasks
Relativistic Super-tasks
Big Bangs and Big Crunches

11 Living Forever
Childhood’s End
The Sociology of Eternity
The Problem-Page of the Unending Future
The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten
Incestuous Time Travel
The Grandmother Paradox
Consistent Histories
Tourists From the Future Time Travellers in the Financial World:
Perpetual Money Machines
Why You Can’t Change the Past
Infinity – Where Will It All End?

Notes
Index