If the old image of the Big Bang was of a white dot appearing in a plane, the new image is of an entire endless plane becoming suddenly illuminated in every part. The initial Big Bang singularity is to have happened not at any single point, but across infinite space. The question turns out to be less hypothetical than I formerly supposed, for nowadays some cosmologists believe that our space is truly infinite, with an endless number of stars and planets.
If our universe is infinite, then it could very well be that somewhere far from Earth, a person exactly like you is reading this precise sentence. And in my answer on page 295, I minimized this likelihood.īut now I feel that I was underestimating the raw power of infinity. In the first of the puzzles and paradoxes at the end of Chapter One, I posed the question of whether an infinite universe would be likely to have planets in every way identical to our own. I’ll take this opportunity to expand upon my text with three notes touching on, respectively, cosmology, computer science, and set theory. Infinity is important and interesting, and learning about it can indeed make a difference in one’s life.
I’m grateful to my publishers, and to the readers who’ve contacted me over the years. Habent sua fata libelli-books have their own destinies. Though I keep hoping to surpass it, this early work may turn out to be my most popular.
So here I am writing a third preface for Infinity and the Mind.
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