Infinities

Interesting concept, isn't it? The popular idea of infinity is of one totality that pretty much crushes everything in its path, no matter the dimension. Yet in the ever-evolving view of scientists, philosophers and other scholars, there really is no single, implacable entity called infinity. Instead, there are infinities, multiplicities of the limit-free that come in a vast variety of shapes, sizes, purposes and and of course, charms. Be warned though, worthy friends can come in prickly packages, and mathematicians have learned to handle infinity with care. “Mathematicians find the concept of infinity so useful, but it can be quite subtle and quite dangerous,” said Ian Stewart, a mathematics researcher at the University of Warwick in England and the author of “Visions of Infinity,” the latest of many books. “If you treat infinity like a normal number, you can come up with all sorts of nonsense, like saying, infinity plus one is equal to infinity, and now we subtract infinity from each side and suddenly naught equals one. You can’t be freewheeling in your use of infinity.” The cloud services are nearing it in the amount of data that traverses the plains of those clouds. With developing technology, the surface area of clouds is becoming monolithic.