Infinity subject in poetry, literature: paradox?
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour…..
Auguries of Innocence
By William Blake
Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?
Lord Byron
THE INFINITE
By Charles Simic
The infinite yawns and keeps yawning.
Is it sleepy?
Does it miss Pythagoras?
The sails on Columbus’s three ships?
Does the sound of the surf remind it of itself?
Does it ever sit over a glass of wine and philosophize?
Does it peek into mirrors at night?
Does it have a suitcase full of souvenirs
stashed away somewhere?
Does it like to lie in a hammock with the wind
whispering sweet nothings in its ear?
Does it enter empty churches and light a single
candle on the altar?
Does it see us as a couple of fireflies
playing hide-and-seek in a graveyard?
Does it find us good to eat?
The New Yorker 02/06/17
Infinity and Me
Kate Hosford
“The night I got my new red shoes, I couldn’t wait to wear them to school. I was too excited to sleep, so I went outside and sat on the lawn. When I looked up, I shivered. The sky seemed so huge and cold.
How many stars were in the sky?
A million? A billion?
Maybe the number was as big as infinity.
A million? A billion?
Maybe the number was as big as infinity.
I started to feel very, very small, how could I even think about something as big as infinity?”
Animated by this unnerving question, Uma turns to the people in her life for an answer.
Her classmate imagines infinity as a number so immense that he wouldn’t be able to write it out even if he lived forever.
Her grandmother compares infinity to an enormous family tree with ancestry going back countless generations.
Her teacher likens infinity to never-ending music that loops in circle.
The more Uma ponders infinity, the more she realizes that it is inseparable from eternity — and the notion of “forever” confounds and captivates her just as much. The question of personal continuity is, after all, one of the greatest mysteries of human life.
_____
Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and “there is no hippopotamus in the room”
_____
Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The scenario presents a cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. The thought experiment is also often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger coined the term Verschränkung (entanglement) in the course of developing the thought experiment.
No comments:
Post a Comment