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Showing posts from July, 2013

A Little More Everything

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A few weeks ago I wrote a post suggesting that the mathematical concept of zero may interfere with our understanding of the physical world around us.  Because of zero, maybe we believe that there's a  smallest thing--that there's a floor, a hard limit on the low end of sizes, distances, and quantities--when in fact, that may not be true.  Every point of matter--every atom--may contain infinite regress within it.  Or... the concepts of "large" or "small" or "inward" and "outward" may simply not be well-founded. Just after writing that post, I caught Radiolab's "The Trouble with Everything."   In the second half of the episode, Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich argues with Columbia physicist Brian Greene.  Now that physics suggests that there may be infinite possible universes (there's no reason to think that the big bang happened only once, in one location, i.e., our universe), Krulwich argues, the dream that Physics