I thought that this video by Sabine was one of the more interesting ones in recent months, as I had not heard before of the idea that the current problems with the incomplete understanding of physics is being caused by the concept of infinity being taken too seriously, so to speak.
I see that this idea has been discussed not so long ago at Scientific American, and other places.
I do find it an intuitively pleasing idea - given that infinity is so counter-intuitive in so many ways.
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I first learned about the ultrafinitists last year, watching a Netflix documentary about infinity. A sadly disappointing documentary, as it happened - rehashing all of the pop-science concepts that appear in every pop-science book and completely missing out on other theological, poetic, cultural, or philosophical ideas of the infinite and eternal. ANYWAY.
But one of the interesting bits was one of their call-in experts, one Doron Zeilberger, a mathematician who ended by saying, on the one hand, that 'Infinity may or may not exist', and on the other, came up with the gobsmacking claim that 'I think that the numbers go up to some unimaginably huge figure, and then cycle back to one again.' WHAT? A charming, if baffling, concept.
Anyway, infinity is great. And banishing the concept entirely from mathematics would be just as counter-intuitive as keeping infinity, ne sais pas?
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