Infinity!

     Infinity!

     Just the sound of the word is awe inspiring, why it even sounded good when Buzz Lightyear kept yelling “To infinity and beyond” in the original “Toy Story”.  Actually the concept of Infinity in itself is hard enough to deal with let alone trying to imagine what might exist beyond it.  As a matter of fact most scientists agree that the human mind is unable to visualize or comprehend such an abstract concept as infinity.  You see we humans are undoubtedly the most finite creatures on the planet, we define everything in our lives by a starting and stopping point.  The day starts the day ends, we got to sleep we awake up, we go to work we come home, we are born we die, and so forth.
     There is nothing that we do or experience that goes on in a continuous manner, which makes it darn near impossible for us to imagine something that just goes on and on forever, like a politicians speech.  Our minds can’t comprehend the concept of infinity any more than most of us can visualize our own demise.  As a matter of fact those people who have survived suicide will almost without exception recount that right after they pulled the trigger, or stepped off the bridge railing, they suddenly realized that they may have made a slight mistake.  You see they were unable to actually conceive of their own demise until it whacked them right between the eyes, and sadly in most cases a little late.
     But that’s another subject to be covered later, for now lets get back to our original subject, infinity.   For the purposes of this post I will only be dealing with the scientific disciplines regarding infinity.  First we have  mathematical infinity, by simply dividing 1 by 3 we arrive at the .333333......... or in other words a never ending decimal, a number that goes on forever without ever coming out to an even solution.  Another famous example of a mathematical infinite would be “PI” or the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter and like 1 being divided by 3 it never attains a solution with no remainder.  Or does it?  In an infinite universe can one unequivocally state that somewhere out there 3 will go into 1 and PI will reach final solution?  You see there is no way to prove it or disprove an
infinite number since it is infinite!
     Now if all this is giving you the equivalent of intellectual brain freeze then lets consider cosmological infinity.  Nearly every human being born who survived to the age where they could begin asking questions has looked into a clear night sky and asked themselves the question, “does it have an end or does it go on forever.”  Well, even the modern scientific community doesn’t seem to be able to agree on whether the Universe is infinite or not.
We can only deal with what is called the “observable universe”.  If you subscribe to the “Big Bang Theory” the universe is about fourteen billion years old, and we are only able to see the light that reaches us from the bodies that were shot out in all directions by this titanic explosion.  Cosmologists estimate that these bodies have now reached a distance from the origin of the explosion of some forty-six billion light years.

     Now for the weird part, the objects spued out by an explosion of any kind begin decelerating instantly upon expulsion.  In a vacuum these objects decelerate much more slowly but since there is no such thing as perpetual motion they will invariably begin to slow down no matter how long it takes, right?  Well that was the popular theory for years, but astrophysicists now believe that the debris is accelerating, not decelerating which defies the laws of physics.  If this is true the there exists something with more gravitational pull than all the matter in the observable universe that is attracting all matter evenly away from the center in all directions.  But wait!  Now there is a growing number of cosmologists and physicists that feel there was no Big Bang and that the universe has always existed in its present state.
     So what is my point, just this, “what a bunch of hooey”, what kind of a pompous ass do you have to be to pretend that you have a clue as to what makes something as complex and abstract as the universe tick.  It was only 600 years ago that scientists declared the world to be flat and that if you ventured too far from land you would sail off the edge.  The problem is that science is no longer a pursuit of the truth, it has become a pursuit of funding and grant monies.  There are so many
competing parties for a finite amount of money that you hardly know who to believe.  Prime examples would be the Large Hadron Collider which has promised for years that they are on the verge of solving the riddles of the universe, and year after year large chunks of cash are lavished on a project that has yet to provide anything useful to mankind.  Then there is Global Warming, a serious subject that could mean dire consequences for the human race, but now we find out that the scientists involved in measuring the extent of the problem falsified findings in order to keep their funding on line.

    The sad part of all this is that they are the same people who expect us to accept things like dark matter, black holes, dark energy, and the Higgs Boson particle as gospel.  Then these so called enlightened open minded scholars poke fun at and ridicule those people who believe in things like life after death, extra sensory perception, religion, mental telepathy, and paranormal activity.  I don’t pretend to have a degree in physics, or a Mensa membership card, but I do know this, if you blindly close your mind to the beliefs of your fellow man, don’t expect that fellow man to accept what you have to say.  As far as what we can believe or disbelieve coming from the minds of the scientific community I am always reminded of what Albert Einstein had to say about scientific theories when he said, “If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”