X-Message-Number: 22002 Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 07:17:19 -0700 Subject: No Physical Infinity From: Peter Merel <> Michael C Price writes, > When a charged particle accelerates it emits an inifinite (alepth_0) > number of real photons. This is known as the infrared divergence, > and is an example of where nature realises an infinity. It's a matter of choice of representation. Any physical number represents three ontologies - unit, metric, and value. If these are each distinguished as some fraction of the entire universe of description accessible to your sensors, then no infinity would be necessary to characterize the result of an experiment. Most people prefer to represent and juggle infinities for the convenience of employing traditional analytic math. There may be advantages to reformulating analysis to eliminate the use of infinity ... but this is not a trivial program. Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22002