YES and/or No!
"There are two sorts of eternity, from the present backwards to eternity, and from the present forward." -Abraham Cowley
Yes!
An infinite amount of nothing adds up to something. I find it creepy that the above two numbers, 1 and 0.999999... are considered the same by mathematicians, but they are.
There are many more proofs of the above that are more complex, but you don't need them because 1 = 0.999...
Creeped out? Keep reading.
No!
Even more odd is Zeno's Paradoxes, specifically the one about a race between Achilles and the Tortoise. The wording is difficult so I'll put it a more digestible way:If you walk halfway across a room, and then half of that distance, and then half of that distance... on and on forever (according to Zeno) two things will happen:
1) You will never reach the end of the room, and
2) You will never stop moving!
Zeno was Wrong because of the same thing that (sort of) explains 1 and 0.999... being equal: transfinite infinities. If the distances become infinitely small, so does the time to traverse them.
The infinities eventually add up to 1 (or getting across the room).
Now don't you feel better about 0.999.... equaling 1? Me neither, but at least it takes the edge off so I can sleep.
My next post on probability/chance briefly goes into infinities of nothing adding up to the possibility of something big: quantum tunneling.
