Up until a couple days ago I thought a googolplex was the largest number with a name. I remember hearing about it years and years ago on a show called the cosmos with Carl Sagan. That was a pretty awesome some . RIP Carl and thanks for all the information you shared with us. A googolplexian was new to me as well until I started looking things up.
if infinite means it goes on forever it would make more sense to say infinity - 1. that way it would have a definite end without going on forever. and does anybody understand a word mantis is saying?
tradition can only carry you so far, then you have to start winning again.
Quote: Your biggest problem is you are trying to qualify infinity as number and it's not.You need a paradigm shift where you stop trying figure out how many zeros there are and just recognize it as a set of numbers that never ends.
Not at all. I think of infinity as that which is unconditioned and unbounded by something else. That's not a quantitative understanding of infinity. But when it comes to conceiving an infinite thing without resorting to abstractions, we can't help but think of it in terms of quantity. Hence my original claim that no one can conceive an infinite God. We can speak abstractly of a God that is unconditioned and unbounded, but when we try to think of what God might be in actuality, we resort to the quantitative understanding of infinity, which in reality is only the understanding of the finite on a grand scale.
Quote: You can't do any kind of arithmetic to Infinite.
Infinite + x Infinite - x Infinite * x Infinite / x
In any of those equations you will never get to the operator because Infinite goes on forever.
Infinity * 0 ?
In general, the answer is indeterminant, but you can sometimes get an answer. For instance - 1/x^2 * x as x goes to infinity = 0 -- even though the second term goes to infinity.
Similarly x^3 * exp(-x) goes to 0 while x goes to infinity.
But exp(x) * 1/x goes to infinity as x goes to infinity.
4*x^2 / (x^2 + x) goes to 4 as x goes to infinity.
etc.
"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:33-34
Quote: Isn't that pretty much the same thing? Indeterminant means that there is no end result?
Yes - and if I just said "what is infinity * 0" then there is no end result.
But in a lot of circumstances, like the ones I listed, there is an end result.
More generally, L'Hopital's rule can give you the answer (at least, as a limit) in lots of these cases.
"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:33-34
Quote: I think of infinity as analogous to zero, only the opposite. Unless time and space is circular, in which case they're the same.
What?
"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:33-34
Quote: How can you keep God out of it when God is infinite and in everything?
Only if I happen to believe in "god". I wish people wouldn't be so narrow minded with it comes to spirituality. I may or may not be a christian it doesn't matter. You're asking a theological question, one which i will not engage in, in a thread about what the biggest number is, which is purely mathematics.
If you want to talk about an infinite god start a separate thread.
I don't say this to demean or insult anyone ..... and maybe it's off topic, but since the subject was brought up, I have to say something.
I just cannot see how anyone can look at the world, the universe, the perfect way that everything fits together, and not see an intelligence behind it. I just cannot believe that all of this just happened by chance. The more we learn, we see perfect processes that work perfectly together. I just don't see chance, or fortune, or randomness in any of it.
I look around this world, and I see God and His work everywhere. It just astonishes me that anyone else could fail to see Him. I have felt His presence in my life. I feel sorry for those who cannot, or will not.
OK: Off topic alert over.
Micah 6:8; He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.
John 14:19 Jesus said: Because I live, you also will live.
I don't say this to demean or insult anyone ..... and maybe it's off topic, but since the subject was brought up, I have to say something.
I just cannot see how anyone can look at the world, the universe, the perfect way that everything fits together, and not see an intelligence behind it. I just cannot believe that all of this just happened by chance. The more we learn, we see perfect processes that work perfectly together. I just don't see chance, or fortune, or randomness in any of it.
I look around this world, and I see God and His work everywhere. It just astonishes me that anyone else could fail to see Him. I have felt His presence in my life. I feel sorry for those who cannot, or will not.
OK: Off topic alert over.
As a believer myself, can you fathom that it is possible God chooses for these folks to not believe, that he is using that mindset to a purpose. One we may never know or understand?
Were you always a believer, never a doubt? Or did it come through some event in your life? Even though you believed, did you always practice faith with your full mind, heart and soul?
See I believe everyone has a purpose. As someone's signature says "if we all had like minds, we'd never learn", and I think that is true in faith as well. If we don't have different levels of faith and non-believers, then how do we learn to advance our own faith?
We don't have to agree with each other, to respect each others opinion.
I'm pretty sure by this point we are talking about different things. Anything I might reply I have already written in previous responses. Thanks for the intelligent discussion, though. I truly do appreciate it.
Quote: I thought this would be interesting as it relates to the probability of extraordinarily unlikely events. A googol is ten to the hundredth power (10^100). A one followed by one hundred zeroes. A googolplex is ten to the googleth power. A one followed by a googol zeroes, or (10^googol).
What I want to do is ask about the probability of seemingly impossible events and in each case I want you to put down your feeling of which of the three categories the answer is in:
A. More common than one/googol
B. Rarer than one in a googol but more common than one in a googolplex.
C. Rarer than one/googolplex
Here we go...
1. The chances that you will win the next 100 lotteries in a row.
2. Your 90 year old grandmother's (assuming you have one) next 50 bowling games are 300.
3. Every time a poker machine is played for the next million years (assuming it lasts that long), it will deal a pat, 5 card royal flush from a 52 card deck.
4. Suppose for that any atom, there is a 1 out of 10 billion chance in the next second it will behave radioactively and shoot out a subparticle of nuclear energy. Now, consider the event where every atom in the universe gives off one of these freak particles every second for the next millennium.
5. A parrot, who has been taught to randomly speak every individual sound in the English language, randomly recites Hamlet.
None of these are trick questions and I hope if anybody is bored enough to respond, you don't argue about the validity of the question or the semantics.
I mean for all the questions to be pure probability regarding multiple unlikely independent events.
I don't say this to demean or insult anyone ..... and maybe it's off topic, but since the subject was brought up, I have to say something.
I just cannot see how anyone can look at the world, the universe, the perfect way that everything fits together, and not see an intelligence behind it. I just cannot believe that all of this just happened by chance. The more we learn, we see perfect processes that work perfectly together. I just don't see chance, or fortune, or randomness in any of it.
I look around this world, and I see God and His work everywhere. It just astonishes me that anyone else could fail to see Him. I have felt His presence in my life. I feel sorry for those who cannot, or will not.
OK: Off topic alert over.
As a believer myself, can you fathom that it is possible God chooses for these folks to not believe, that he is using that mindset to a purpose. One we may never know or understand?
Were you always a believer, never a doubt? Or did it come through some event in your life? Even though you believed, did you always practice faith with your full mind, heart and soul?
See I believe everyone has a purpose. As someone's signature says "if we all had like minds, we'd never learn", and I think that is true in faith as well. If we don't have different levels of faith and non-believers, then how do we learn to advance our own faith?
I believe that God gives us far more freedom than most people would like to think. He does not force anyone to believe in Him. He does not bend people to His will. He gives them the ability to come to Him of their own free will, or to walk away to condemnation.
I do think that those who have legitimately never heard the Word of God will be given a chance at Judgement to accept Christ as their savior. Honestly, I think that even those who had rejected Christ their entire lives will probably get a chance to accept Christ as their Savior. However, I do think that many who rejected God and Christ their entire lives will continue to do so even at Judgement, even face to face with God, and even with Christ at the side of God. I think that many have decided that they simply will not believe, that it is somehow "cool" not to believe.
The Bible says that we will all face Judgement, and those of us who believe will already have our names written in the Book of Life, and will proceed into glory. Those who do not, will face judgement. They will answer for their works upon the earth, and they will answer for their sins.
The question of omniscience and predestination is, I think, a difficult one for many of us. However, pre-knowledge of what is to come does not necessarily mean that God has personally written the story down to every last detail for each of us. He knows what will happen, but it is our choices and decisions that take us to that final outcome. We are not puppets, with God as our Geppetto. God granted us free will. I think that He guides the world according to His desired ends, but is very subtle about it. If, for example, God had wanted to avoid Hitler and the extermination of millions of Jews, he could have done so by having Hitler be hit by a car as a child. Or he could have increased, or decreased, Germany's economic and military might to a level that they would not be a threat, He could have caused the first troops to fall ill prior to invasion. He did not, though, so it was part of His plan that such events take place.
The result of WWII, in the end, was the creation of a Jewish state, which was the exact opposite of what Hitler and the Nazis wanted. Was that God's will? Could be. Did he influence events and people towards His ends? Probably. Was it a matter of directly "telling" a man to do such and such a thing, or was it more like a scientist adding several components together, mixed with the free will of mankind, but also with foreknowledge of how things will turn out. I truly do not believe that we have the level of sophistication, any of us, to comprehend how the mind of God truly works, and how He manages the universe. I know that I don't. I have personally struggled with predestination questions. Are people predestined to certain ends? No. Does God already know how everything in the entirety of the universe will turn out? Yes. He gave everyone free will, and He knows how they will use it, even if He did not specifically decide everything for each and every person. God knows all, and controls all, but he gave us the right to decide for ourselves almost every facet of our lives for ourselves.
Man, I am probably not communicating this very well. It is a difficult answer for me to try to wrap my head around, and explaining something that I have such a hard time trying to understand is even more difficult. I must also have also not done a good job on a PM I received. For that I apologize as well.
As far as myself, I have been both a believer, and a doubter. I have had some events that caused my faith to waver. I am not going to go into them here, but I have had doubts. Today, however, my faith is stronger than ever. I look at things that happen for the "whys" behind them. If I look hard enough, and often not that hard at all, I can usually find the whys. I see God's purpose for things that happen. I may not always like what happens, but I can see why many things happen, especially in my own life. I have felt the power of God's love in my own life. I have had moments of despair when I prayed and felt this calming influence come over me. There have been events that I never thought I would see happen, happen ...... and I see God's work in my own life. Others may mark things off as chance, but I cannot. I have felt God speak to me, not in a voice, but more as a comforting hand on the shoulder in times of anguish, sorrow, and distress. I cannot even hope to disavow the presence of God, because to do so would be to lie.
Anyway, I hope that I answered some of your questions in there somewhere. I rambled a lot.
Micah 6:8; He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.
John 14:19 Jesus said: Because I live, you also will live.
My choice of words may have been incorrect in my first sentence though. Rather than "can you fathom that it is possible God chooses for these folks to not believe, that he is using that mindset to a purpose." I should have said "can you fathom that it is possible God can still use these folks who do not believe for a purpose?"
Basically the premise that even if they don't believe that they are still his children and he still uses them for a greater purpose.
I believe every person we come into contact each and every day has a chance to affect us, or us them, regardless of each person's faith. Those affects may never be known to us, or may not become known until a much later date, but they all have the opportunity to alter the direction of each persons path. A path that no matter what direction we choose, will continue to use us to affect the next we come into contact with.
We don't have to agree with each other, to respect each others opinion.
Quote: I thought this would be interesting as it relates to the probability of extraordinarily unlikely events. A googol is ten to the hundredth power (10^100). A one followed by one hundred zeroes. A googolplex is ten to the googleth power. A one followed by a googol zeroes, or (10^googol).
What I want to do is ask about the probability of seemingly impossible events and in each case I want you to put down your feeling of which of the three categories the answer is in:
A. More common than one/googol
B. Rarer than one in a googol but more common than one in a googolplex.
C. Rarer than one/googolplex
Here we go...
1. The chances that you will win the next 100 lotteries in a row.
2. Your 90 year old grandmother's (assuming you have one) next 50 bowling games are 300.
3. Every time a poker machine is played for the next million years (assuming it lasts that long), it will deal a pat, 5 card royal flush from a 52 card deck.
4. Suppose for that any atom, there is a 1 out of 10 billion chance in the next second it will behave radioactively and shoot out a subparticle of nuclear energy. Now, consider the event where every atom in the universe gives off one of these freak particles every second for the next millennium.
5. A parrot, who has been taught to randomly speak every individual sound in the English language, randomly recites Hamlet.
None of these are trick questions and I hope if anybody is bored enough to respond, you don't argue about the validity of the question or the semantics.
I mean for all the questions to be pure probability regarding multiple unlikely independent events.
I know that this is boring and nerdy enough that nobody will respond
But the answer to all of those questions is B, and all of them are much closer to A than they are to C.
Of course they are still so prohibitively unlikely that if any of those things were to actually happen, you would and should rightfully question the assumptions that the questions were based on, but I said specifically said not to do that.
Well, I can take a crack at a few (turns out #4 is C, the rest are well in B territory):
Quote: 1. The chances that you will win the next 100 lotteries in a row.
The odds of winning the powerball are 1 in 175.2 million (http://www.latinospost.com/articles/20247/20130529/powerball-winning-numbers-29-2013-live-stream-drawing-time-40m.htm) So this is exactly calculable, it is 1 in 175,200,000 ^ 100
So it is 1 in 2.25 * 10 ^ 884, so B.
Quote: Your 90 year old grandmother's (assuming you have one) next 50 bowling games are 300.
Ok, can't calculate this exactly, lets say that your grandma hits a strike 1% of the time (by some luck). In each game, she has to throw 12 strikes (due to the last frame), so she needs to throw 600 strikes in a row - so the odds are 1 in 100^600 = 1 in 10^1200, again the answer is B.
Quote: 3. Every time a poker machine is played for the next million years (assuming it lasts that long), it will deal a pat, 5 card royal flush from a 52 card deck.
Now we get nuts - the odds on this are actually 0 - (because poker machines draw numbers from random number generators, and they aren't quite random, and if they had a run this long, programmers would decide the number generators sucked, and would have gotten rid of them).
Assuming it's actually random. there are 52x51x50x49x48 = 311875200 possible deals -- since order doesn't matter, there are 2,598,960 hands. 4 of them are royal flushes. There are probably about 10,000 poker machines in the world, and each deals maybe 1,000 hands a day. So there are 10^7 deals per day. And we do this for 365 * 1e6 = 3.65e8 days.
So the odds are (4/2,598,960) ^ (3.65e15) = 1.53 x 10^(-6.3e15) - so again the answer is B. Though this is vastly more improbable than either of the other two.
Quote: 4. Suppose for that any atom, there is a 1 out of 10 billion chance in the next second it will behave radioactively and shoot out a subparticle of nuclear energy. Now, consider the event where every atom in the universe gives off one of these freak particles every second for the next millennium.
Gonna stop explaining here, because nobody is paying attention anymore.
So this is C -- and much less probable if you also calculate the percentage that it is exactly once per second, instead of at least once.
Quote: 5. A parrot, who has been taught to randomly speak every individual sound in the English language, randomly recites Hamlet.
This is somewhere in the world of B - but i'm too lazy to compute it.
Last edited by Lyuokdea; 05/29/1303:19 PM.
"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:33-34
Quote: 4. Suppose for that any atom, there is a 1 out of 10 billion chance in the next second it will behave radioactively and shoot out a subparticle of nuclear energy. Now, consider the event where every atom in the universe gives off one of these freak particles every second for the next millennium.
Quote: Gonna stop explaining here, because nobody is paying attention anymore.
So this is C -- and much less probable if you also calculate the percentage that it is exactly once per second, instead of at least once.
This is much closer than I had realized. I remember doing this years ago when I originally posted it. How many atoms are in the observable universe? I would use 10^80 instead of 10^90 http://www.universetoday.com/36302/atoms-in-the-universe/ but will defer to you on that.
(1e-10 (event/sec)^((10^80 (atoms/universe) * (3.15e10 sec/ millennium)) = 1e-10 ^ (3.15^90) and still barely in the realm of B. And this is where I realize that I haven't done this in so long and will probably have to re-check myself.
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