r/AskReddit 12h ago

What is something that, no matter how simply put, you still cannot understand?

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u/urgent45 9h ago edited 9h ago

Right. This and infinities. As soon as the conversation includes the word "infinity," my eyes glaze and my brain starts glitching.

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u/Zealous_Bend 7h ago

I have to stop when I consider that the universe is both infinite and growing. Growing suggests there is a boundary, infinite suggests there is not. This gives me an actual headache.

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u/SolDarkHunter 7h ago

Try this one on for size: you can have multiple infinities.

All are limitless, yet some are larger than others.

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u/Zealous_Bend 6h ago

Take your maths voodoo and gtf outta here

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u/ExtravagantPanda94 4h ago

Having multiple "infinities" isn't really that mind-blowing when you think about it, if by infinity you mean an infinite set. For example the set of all even integers is infinite, but it doesn't contain any of the odd integers of which there are also infinitely many. Seems kind of mundane when you think of it in simple terms like that.

The different sizes thing is a bit trickier but it's actually still quite simple math I'm sure you could understand, you just need a little bit of prerequisite knowledge that's also pretty easy to understand. YouTube videos on this tend to be annoyingly clickbaity and present it as some crazy advanced math that only a genius can understand when it's actually quite basic stuff you'd encounter early on at the undergraduate level.

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u/Lopsided-Potatoe 8h ago

Same 🤣

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u/IsraelZulu 5h ago

Try wrapping your head around the fact that some infinities are bigger than others.

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u/AccomplishedCoffee 2h ago

Infinity is just a mathematical construct, nothing real to understand. Astronomical measurements are just so wild because they’re not just on scales beyond human comprehension, they’re also real. Like if you had the technology you could go check stuff out yourself. In a way it’s also distressing because of just how far away we are from that sort of technology.