THE INFINITE BOOK: A SHORT GUIDE TO THE BOUNDLESS, TIMELESS AND ENDLESS by Barrow, John D - 2006

Vintage Books, 2006. Paperback. Good. A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless. Everything you might want to know about infinity - in history, and all the way to today's cutting-edge science. Throughout history, the Infinite has been a dangerous idea. Men have lost t heir lives, their careers, or their freedom for talking about it. Where did the idea come from, and what is it telling us about the universe? Can ther e actually be infinities, or is infinity just a label for something that is never reached? Can you do an infinite number of things in a finite amount of time? Is the universe infinite? Will it exist forever? All manner of paradoxes and fantasies characterize an infinite universe. If our universe is infinite, then an infinite number of exact copies of you a re at this very moment reading an identical sentence on an identical planet somewhere else in the universe. So what is it like to live in a universe w here nothing is original, where you can live forever, where anything that c an be done, is done, over and over again? These are some of the deep questions that the idea of the infinite pushes us to ask. The Infinite Book will explore these provocative questions and the strange answers that scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and theologians have come up with to deal with its threats to our sanity.