The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Author:John D. Barrow [Barrow, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: General, Science, Fiction, Physics
ISBN: 9780307428769
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Fig 8.3 Three possible futures for an oscillating universe: (a) An oscillating universe of many equal cycles. (b) The size of the expansion maximum should grow as the oscillations continue because of the second law of thermodynamics. (c) If a dark energy exists which accelerates the expansion then an increasing sequence of cycles must eventually end and be replaced by a state of indefinite expansion.

THE NEVER-ENDING STORY

‘Infinity is a floorless room without walls or ceiling.’

Anonymous18

The Infinite Replication Paradox has been a source of fascination to writers as well as to scientists and philosophers. Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer of short stories, was always fascinated by the possibilities it created. Here are three of the scenarios that he created from the paradoxical properties of infinity.

The first is The Library of Babel, an infinite honeycomb of rooms containing an endless array of all possible books. Borges’s library has many recognisable features – it is infinite in extent, it is infinite in age, and it follows the specification for an infinite universe made by Nicholas of Cusa: that its centre is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere. The mysterious library that Umberto Eco evoked in The Name of the Rose seems like a finite extract from Borges’s great Library of Babel:

‘The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries . . . From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below – one after another, endlessly . . . I declare that the Library is endless . . . The Library is a sphere whose exact centre Is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable . . . I wish to recall a few axioms . . . The Library has existed ab aeternitate. That truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no rational mind can doubt . . . Some five-hundred years ago . . . [a] philosopher observed that all books, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also posited a fact which all travellers have since confirmed: In all the Library, there are no two Identical books. From these incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is ‘total’ – perfect, complete, and whole – and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite) – that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All – the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language,

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