Infinity Is a Beautiful Concept – And It's Ruining Physics

Infinity Is a Beautiful Concept – And It's Ruining Physics

Infinity Is a Beautiful Concept – And It’s Ruining Physics

 By Max Tegmark

 Physics is all about predicting the future from the past, but inflation seems to sabotage this. When we try to predict the probability that something particular will happen, inflation always gives the same useless answer: infinity divided by infinity. The problem is that whatever experiment you make, inflation predicts there will be infinitely many copies of you, far away in our infinite space, obtaining each physically possible outcome; and despite years of teeth-grinding in the cosmology community, no consensus has emerged on how to extract sensible answers from these infinities. So, strictly speaking, we physicists can no longer predict anything at all!