Horizon: To Inifinity and Beyond

I get the general impression that the physics videos on Horizon are edited to make them "sexy" while the maths ones are edited to portray a kind of mystery and insanity.

Worst of all, the physics videos actually show some physics or try and explain something; I am not saying it is a lecture and sometimes the things are too advanced but at least every 10 minutes there is a short explanation of something that is put into laymen's terms. The only "explanation" on the video was Cameron explaining remarkably well why the two sets have the same cardanility and then when the interviewer asks the question "How?" the shot is over without explanation

He was Russian and it was completely ridiculous. I literally cannot believe someone would be prepared to pubicly announce they think there is a largest natural number - it is just literally absurd to do mathematics working on that assumption*.

I can only imagine he was doing it for a laugh but it wasn't very funny.

* I imagine you can do OK for a while but you certainly wouldn't be able to do "proper" analysis for instance and you would ofcourse either have to come up with a new system of numbers entirely or just do away with ZFC and miss out on things [like uncountability of the reals to name something glaringly obvious].

The German (I think) mathematician who absolutely rejects infinity was interesting too: you count to the largest number and return to zero.

I get the general impression that the physics videos on Horizon are edited to make them "sexy" while the maths ones are edited to portray a kind of mystery and insanity.

Horizon has been dumbed down a lot.

But, lol they tried to portray all mathematician who worked in infinity as going insane, which is rubbish.

I'm confused why Graham's Number is considered to be the 'biggest' natural number.

So what about "Graham's Number + 1"? Or [Graham's Number]^[Graham's Number]?

About the documentary - interesting, but didn't really learn anything. It was okay until up to 30 minutes in, where it just started to repeat itself.

Horizon has been dumbed down a lot.

What do you expect? Most people in Britain wouldn't have even understood the first proof that the set of all natural numbers and the set of all even numbers are the same size.

I dont know anything about Physics, but what was all that red-shift stuff we learned at school? Doesn't that show it's finite and expanding?

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sorry if im wrong here...but surely for numbers to reach a final/largest number and then return to zero then we would have to ignore all complex and negative numbers?

it makes no sense to consider what happens outside the observable universe. so surely the question of whether of the universe is infinite, doesn't actually mean anything. since there's theoretically no way of knowing right?

The observable universe is finite, obviously, so for all intensive purposes, "the universe" is finite.

I dunno, I think its silly to ask questions we have no possible way of answering. like the retarded "Brain in a vat" philsophical idea.

it makes no sense to consider what happens outside the observable universe. so surely the question of whether of the universe is infinite, doesn't actually mean anything. since there's theoretically no way of knowing right?

The observable universe is finite, obviously, so for all intensive purposes, "the universe" is finite.

I dunno, I think its silly to ask questions we have no possible way of answering. like the retarded "Brain in a vat" philsophical idea.