“Thoughts are very powerful and these thoughts make us infinitely powerful, if we can control our thoughts and

believe that I
am present and I am…?” The first time that I thought about infinity, I was looking up at the sky and I was counting. And at a
certain point, I realize this goes on forever. I want to start with sort of the premise, which is that we're looking for infinity. So,
where should we go looking? I don't think everybody's looking for infinity. Is infinity a number, a place, an idea, a concept? If
you ask me, probably all of the above. Numbers never end. That's the basic idea of infinity. If I imagine continuing to count for
as long as I can count, infinity will definitely last longer than my lifetime. The funny thing is, all these numbers that you can
imagine, they're like zero, nothing. Any number, no matter how big, is just absolutely insignificant compared to infinity. For
me, infinity is not scary. I find infinity beautiful, and haunting, and thrilling. I love Infinity. I guess if I start thinking about, "I'll
be dead forever" there's a side of me that's worried about it. But then again, I don't plan to be thinking about it. I think to be
conscious is to be wrangling with infinity. I mean, not to be grandiose. When our hearts are broken, are we going to be in pain
forever? And if you really fall in love with someone, are you gonna be in love with them forever? Love is certainly infinite,
because when we are overwhelmed by love, we have this constant sense of breaking the limits and the boundaries. All of these
abstractions or maybe they're just the product of our minds. Who invented infinity? I think to some extent, the concept goes
back earlier than anything that we know. In fact, counting is the very earliest writing that we have. Whoever invented writing
already had the idea of counting, and the idea that you can always count one more must surely go back at least that far. We
have all kinds of different visions of things that are infinite, and they're usually terrifying. There's the vision of the bottomless
pit. There's the idea of time that never ends. If you believe in hell, and if you believe about torture going on forever, a
nightmare that you could never wake up from. I understand that a lot of people find thinking about infinity terrifying, or
nauseating. At least very upsetting. But for some of us, it's one of the deepest pleasures. We're so small and yet we can touch
something so explosively large. That feeling of, "I'm bigger because I know how small I am." I've been chasing that feeling my
entire life. But does infinity exist outside of our minds? In math, I think I was gonna make a comment about what it means to
exist mathematically. So, in math, I think we have an interesting relationship to stuff, to things in existence. If you can
conceive of something, if you can kind of create rules for handling it, then it exists. Infinity is super counterintuitive, and it
leads to a lot of surprising paradoxes, contradictions, intellectual quagmires, quicksand. Many of these are summed up in a
parable that goes by the name of the Infinite Hotel. Imagine a hotel with infinitely many rooms. It's a really popular hotel. And
in fact, it's always booked solid. Every room is occupied. Nevertheless, there's always room at the Infinite Hotel. So, one night,
a new guest shows up. Bang, bang, bang on the bell. "I'd like a room." And the manager says, "Sure. Of course, we can
accommodate you here at the Infinite Hotel." "Just hold on for one minute." The manager tells everyone over the loudspeaker.
Please gather your things. Get ready to move to the next room down the hall. So, the person in room one moves into room
two. Person in room two moves into room three. You might think there's gonna be trouble because all the rooms are
occupied. Nevertheless, as it's an Infinite Hotel, I mean, this can happen. The numbers never stop. One can move to two, two
can move to three, a million can move to a million and one. So, everybody moves down to the next room, which means that
now room one is open, and the new guest can be accommodated. Here, you could keep everyone in the same room and just
have the guest go to the end. A tempting thought would be just have the guest take the last room. Why are we making
everybody else move for this one person? Because there is no last room. Infinity doesn't work like that. You have to start at
the beginning, not at the end. There is no end. Now, a bigger challenge for the manager comes the next night when, instead of
just one guest showing up, suddenly a whole busload full of cranky, sweaty, ill-tempered people all pound on the bell at the
same time, saying, "We all want rooms." There's infinitely many new guests. They all want to be accommodated at this hotel. It
turns out the manager has seen this problem before, and so she calls out over the loudspeaker. Everyone be prepared in a few
minutes to move to the room. That is double your current room. So, person in room one, you're gonna be in room two. Person
in room two, you're now going to be moving into room four. Person in room three, you're going to six. Now, it's a big
inconvenience for a person in room one million. They have to move to room two million, which is a big schlep down the hall.
Well, all these people dutifully move to their new rooms. You'll notice that all the odd-numbered rooms have been vacated.
And so all those new guests can just start filing in. There's one other custom at the Infinite Hotel, which is that this manager is
very conscientious and always checks in on the rooms, infinitely many of them. Fortunately, the manager is very speedy, so
she can get her whole job done in a minute. She spends half a minute making sure everything's okay in room one, and a
quarter of a minute in room two, and then half of that in room three, and so on, going all the way down the hall in the Infinite
Hotel. A half, plus a quarter, plus an eighth, plus a sixteenth, and if you add that up. If you just think about that, when you go
out to infinity, that's gonna add up to one. She's basically gonna be done checking infinitely many rooms in one minute. But,
how does she get back from infinity? Is the biggest problem. That's an interesting puzzle. Where is she at the end? I don't
know. I've been thinking about infinity my whole career, and I don't really see any way out for her. She's out at the end of this
infinitely long hallway, and I don't see how she's gonna come back from there. So, I think that the moral of this crazy parable is
that infinity doesn't behave like anything we're used to. We're used to thinking about collections of finite numbers of things.
Fish, fish, fish. That's three fish. So, we're used to small numbers, or even big numbers. You hear nowadays about trillions of
dollars needing to be spent on the budget. But, those are nothing like infinity. Any finite number, no matter how big, is
nothing compared to infinity. We just don't have good intuition about how infinite things work. It's the biggest possible thing.
It's bigger than anything you can ever think of. So, what happens if you add one in infinity? If infinity is the biggest thing there
is, then when you add one, it should still be infinite. What happens if I subtract infinity from both sides? Then you get one
equals zero. And so immediately you've landed yourself in some kind of an issue, and that's just the start. It turns out you can
write things down that don't have an answer, that doesn't happen in finite arithmetic. If I say one plus two, the answer is
three, and I'm done with it. But if I say one minus one, plus one, minus one. One minus one, plus one, minus one, plus one,
minus one, dot, dot, dot. Keep doing that forever. There is no answer to that. It's not zero and it's not one. It's neither. It's
both. You can try adding infinity to infinity. You can try multiplying infinity to infinity. You get these weird paradoxes. What's
infinity plus infinity? That should also be infinity because it's the biggest thing. You subtract infinity from both sides and you
get infinity equals zero. That's even worse. This is terrible. But it's wonderful, because what is going on? Is infinity beautiful?
It's beautiful. Like I say, it's beautiful because it is. Maybe a good way to think about it is with our circle. There's a very
beautiful shape that often people think of as the most perfect shape, a circle. Perfectly round, never-ending. We see circles
everywhere. I look in your eyes, I see the circle of your iris. I see the circle of your pupil. I see the circle of the sun and the
moon. I love circles. But if you sit down and think about what they are for a second, how many sides do they have, for
example? How many corners do they have? That immediately brings us into face-to-face confrontation with the infinite,
because you can't think about a circle in terms of straight lines. If we think about pointy shapes, say a triangle, if we tried to
use it as a wheel, it would be kind of painful going up the street. If we had ten corners, then that wouldn't be so bad as a
wheel. If you keep going we have infinite sides, then we would be completely like a circle, and we would have infinite corners,
which is like having no corners. Infinity has come round to being just like zero. One of the amazing things about infinity is
that, if you scale it, it's still infinity. Whereas if you take any finite number, if you scale it, which is like multiplying it, it gets
bigger. But infinity doesn't do that somehow, and that's a very odd thing for us to get our heads around. When it comes to a
circle as a set of points. It's an infinite collection of points. I would like to try to convince you that a small circle, like a circle of
radius one, has the same number of points as a huge circle, a circle of radius billion. So, to do that, I need to get you to agree
on what it means to be the same size. I propose that two sets will be said to have the same size if I can put their elements in a
perfect one-to-one correspondence. Now, all I need to give you is a rule that puts the points of a small circle in
correspondence with the points of a larger circle. You can't count the points on the circle, but you can match them up with
the points on a bigger circle. I take my small circle and I just center it somewhere at a point, and then I take the huge circle
and I center it at the same point. From that center point, I'm gonna draw all the radii. I'll draw these kinds of line segments
stretching out from the center to the outer circle. Each of those line segments hits the outer circle on one point and hits the
inner circle on one point, and that's the correspondence. I'm gonna say the point on a particular radius in the small circle is
matched to its corresponding point from the large circle. By sweeping those radii all the way around, I clearly hit all the points
on each circle. And so I'm done. I've got a perfect one-to-one correspondence. You now have to agree that the two infinite
sets have the same size. So, mathematicians don't literally sit there counting to infinity. We just match things up in pairs. And
if you can find a way to match things up in pairs. That's the same then. For example, we can match up all the numbers, the
whole numbers, with the even numbers by just multiplying each one by two. And, the even numbers are only half of them. But,
I can match them up, because if I pair up one with two, and two with four, and three with six, then they pair up exactly.
There's the same number, even though it's half of them. And that's the amazing thing about infinity. Once you've figured out
this way of matching things up to see how big an infinite set is, it turns out that there might be some that you can never
match up, which means that there is some kind of bigger possible infinity. How can there be larger infinities? Infinity is
already as big as we can imagine. There's something beyond that. Probably the smallest infinity is the one that goes one, two,
three, dot, dot, dot. If I was to take the numbers zero and one and ask you how many numbers are there between that, you
could keep dividing and dividing. No matter how many times you divide, there's always a number that you could add another
zero behind the last decimal you had put. And I can make a one-to-one little map, like a little dictionary between those
numbers and the whole numbers. One, two, three, four, five. And so what we say is that those two infinite sets are the same
size. But then there's also other numbers. Things like the square root of two, and pi, and E. And those are just a few that we
know about and use. These are numbers that aren't ordinary fractions, and if we try and write them down as decimals, they'll
somehow go on forever without ever repeating themselves. So, how can we ever say what they are? It took mathematicians
hundreds of years to figure out how to do it rigorously, and when they did, they realized that they're so complicated, it's
actually impossible to put them in a list. No matter how we try to list them, we're doomed to miss some out along the way. We
can't make a one-to-one correspondence between those numbers and the counting numbers. Now that we have two
infinities, would we really stop there? There are bigger and bigger and bigger ones. This is a trail that just keeps on going. An
infinite hierarchy of infinities. This is the kind of thing that, hopefully, turns some people into mathematicians. And no doubt
sends other people running in the other direction. Some people love peering over cliff edges. There are now those glass
bridges where you can step out over the Grand Canyon. There's no way I would do that. But when it's a mathematical cliff
edge, I love it. I think this gets back to this concept of the sublime. When you're out by a waterfall you have this feeling of this
thing that is so much larger than yourself. But then you climb onto the mountain peak and you look out at the next valley, and
you see another waterfall that's even larger, but it's in the distance, so it looks tiny. Infinity is some kind of monster that has to
be tamed. It's infinite! It's attacking the city! Mathematicians needed to invent ways to deal with infinity. Taking something
totally weird and unintuitive and taming it to the point where you can walk around and study it from all sides. And the ways
that they came up with led to the field of rigorous calculus. There's one idea at the heart of calculus, and it's an idea I like to
call the infinity principle. You can make sense of any complicated motion or phenomenon, or anything that's changing, or any
curved shape, by thinking of it as being made of an infinite number of infinitesimally small simpler motions or shapes. This is
one of the greatest ideas in history. Everything to do with movement, and everything to do with things that are continuously
changing, can only be studied rigorously using calculus. Maybe it's trying to communicate with us! We can use calculus to
study its roar! So, the infinity principle is you can make sense of complicated things by breaking them up into infinitely many
simpler things. Solve the problem for the simpler things and then add the results back together to get the original whole. A
picture encoded in the roar! Stop fighting infinity! It's peaceful. The understanding of electricity was made possible by
calculus. And electricity has enabled the entire modern world. Does infinity exist? In one of the senses of math, absolutely no
question about it, because we have a symbol for it, we know how to manipulate that symbol, we can agree on the conclusions
that we reach when doing so. And by doing so, we can solve practical questions. So, from a pure math point of view, that's
your certificate of existence right there. But, if you mean does it physically exist, who knows? That's a question for the
physicists to answer. And so now they've got to go do their expensive things. And figure out whether space-time is infinite or
not. It's a real question. Where can one look for real infinities? We've been struggling with the question of whether the infinite
infinity is a real thing or something that is a human invention for a very long time. Maybe we could approach the infinite. As a
physicist, how thrilling would that be, to do something in the physical world that would tell us that something is physically
infinite? I think all of us have this experience of going out at night in the starry sky. Lying on a beach late at night in Trinidad.
And just wondering about the vastness of outer space. Does it go on forever? I question the notion of infinity when I am using
a particular yardstick which is, can we measure it? Can we access it? Can we, at any point, wrap our arms around it and say,
"Here it is." "There's the infinite." And using that particular yardstick, the answer is no. There's simply no way that we can
measure the infinite. Nobody will ever give you back pi to all of its infinite digits as the result of a measurement. All I'll ever
measure, in a laboratory, or my friends will measure in laboratories, are approximations of infinite numbers. But then you
start to wonder, "Maybe these numbers don't really exist." "And nature doesn't actually make use of them." And I don't know
the answer to that question. That's why sometimes you think, when the universe was created, maybe the speed at which it
came out expanding is an irrational number, like 0.500187923 and the universe is going to compute that infinite list of digits
over the course of time." So, the universe itself is performing a computation, and it's computing infinite numbers possibly. I
feel like I'm freaking you out, but Steven Strogatz had to be pretty out there. You think of a piece of Jell-O. A blob, a block of
Jell-O jiggling on the table or on a plate. You don't picture it as made of atoms. You think it's a continuum of Jell-O stuff that is
infinitely subdivisible and has no gaps. It hangs together perfectly. It's what most of us think stuff really is like. The
mathematicians are great in talking about the continuum. And continuity is the idea that if I take a line, just a short line, I can
cut it in half, and then in half again, and then in half again, and in half again. And I always have a line, and I never stop. I can go
forever. But a completely different question is whether things are actually continuous in reality. Take a rope, cut it in half, and
then again in half, and then again in half. Can we go forever? And this is a question that has been debated since antiquity.
Now, we have understood quite clearly that a piece of rope is not continuous. That no piece of matter is continuous. It's made
by little individual pieces that we call molecules, atoms, particles. My job is to study another kind of continuity, which is a
continuity. It's not of matter. String, or a piece of wood, or a piece of metal. But the continuity of space itself. So, just consider
the space between my hands and imagine having it divided in half, and half, and half, and half. Could it be infinitely divided?
Can we go forever? Is space truly continuous? My gut feeling is that it can't. I think if we take what we know best about the
world, which is Einstein's General Relativity Theory and quantum mechanics, and we bring them together, the clear
consequence of that is that there's a minimal amount of space. It's very small. Incredibly small. Ten to minus 33 centimeters,
the so-called Planck length. Incredibly tiny that it certainly stretches the human imagination to think about. So, if you were to
take an individual atom and magnify it, expand it to be as large as the observable universe, that's a huge scale of
magnification. The Planck length under that magnification would grow to roughly be the size of an average tree. So, a tree is
to the observable universe as the Planck length is to an atom. Even on atomic scales, the distances that we're talking about
where the notion of continuity may break down, where discreteness may emerge, are fantastically small. I have a sort of
pixelated vision of reality at this small scale. It's like, if God didn't draw the universe with continuous lines but just little pixels.
It's many, many, many, many little things, but it's not continuity. It's discrete. It's finite. There is nothing infinitely small. My
favorite example where we can find real infinities is when thinking about black holes. Black holes are these massive objects
where all the matter is condensed so tightly that we get this region around it called the event horizon, from which we get no
information. Now, there's nothing infinite about the event horizon. It's actually empty. A neutral region of space. You wouldn't
even notice when you cross the event horizon. You wouldn't feel anything weird happen to your body. What happens that's
problematic is on the inside of the black hole. In the very literal sense, we know nothing about what goes on inside of the
black hole. But Einstein's theory of general relativity says that, once you make it past the event horizon, eventually if you keep
just falling in you'll reach a point called the singularity. A region which is an infinite curvature in space-time. Where all the
mass of the black hole is concentrated. Infinite densities, and completely catastrophic.That's really, considered such a horror
show is that, in a finite time, in microseconds, in fact, you would hit this region of infinite curvature and infinite density and
simply fall out of existence. As though you weren't part of the natural world anymore, so you weren't physics stopped. It's
really a violation of the whole continuity of the program of understanding nature. It starts to say nature's fundamentally
unknowable in this one secret place inside this black hole. And that just doesn't feel right. The singularity, this region of
infinite curvature, infinite density, I bet that doesn't really happen. The infinity the equations predict is a hint. It hints at us,
there's something new there. Sometimes, when I think about the infinity at the center of a black hole, I think about it as like a
dying man scratching a clue in the dirt, telling us. "General relativity doesn't work here." I'm of the opinion that there is a new
physics, actually, in a black hole. I think that one thing that could be happening there is that there's some sort of portal into a
new realm. Maybe a new universe, for example. There's something I'm working on now that seems to show what could
happen if the math works out. You could have certain portals where you can actually go through the black hole. We call these
things wormholes. A wormhole is something where, at some point, I say, "Here's a sphere." "And I have a sphere inside this one
that's got a bigger area." And then inside that one is another sphere with a bigger area than that. At some level we are confined
by our normal understanding of space and time. Something inside another thing is smaller. But that bigger thing is here. If I
went in there, I would be in that bigger thing. And yet I'm just sort of outside of it. It's totally clear mathematically, and when I
look at this, I have no idea how that could be. So, I want you to think about this and tell me what it makes you think about
with infinity. I would say that if I were some microscopic being living at the surface of this ball, I may conclude that this
surface is infinite, cause it would take an infinite amount of time, for example, in my imagination of infinity, to go from one
side of the ball to the other side. But, it's not infinite. For me, it's not infinite. So, you're not holding infinity in your hand? I see
everything in this room reflected in this sphere. If we didn't have walls in this room, I'd be able to see the entire universe in
this sphere. The entire universe that's behind me, because there's a path from everything to this sphere and then to my eye.
The one thing we cannot do in space-time is look down on the universe like this. And this is one of the, in some terms,
mistakes we make, when we try to imagine a finite universe. We imagine being in a space higher up, an extra dimension out,
and looking down on it. But, of course, that would be part of the universe. If light could get to me, that's part of the universe.
So, there is never such a thing. You can't jump out of the universe and look down on it. Ever. The old story from Plato, the
prisoners in the cave? It's an old bit of philosophy, that the prisoners are trapped in the cave, their backs are to the opening of
the cave, light is streaming into the cave, but all the prisoners can see is shadows on the wall of the cave of things happening
out there in the world. To me, this is the shadow. This is not the real sphere. This is not the perfect sphere. The perfect sphere
would have infinitely many points on its surface and inside. This thing is made of atoms. There's a lot of but not infinitely
many. It's a shadow of infinity. I love this shadow because it gives me a glimpse of infinity. It feels almost inconceivable. We're
finite creatures, we have access to finite things. We can only do so much in a lifetime. Could we somehow nonetheless get a
glimpse into something that is truly infinite? And I think this is not impossible. An example that I've spent quite a lot of time
thinking about is, "What would happen to a physical system if you just wait an infinite amount of time?" So, let's imagine we
take a box. It's an excellent box. Nothing can come in. Nothing can go out. We put an apple in the box, and close the box. We
might come back in a month and the apple is looking kind of mealy and decayed. Come back in a year, the apple is a real mess.
The apple is rotting. Bacteria have done their thing. Come back in a hundred years the apple is probably a kind of dust. The
apple contains chemical energy, the same kind of energy you'd get if you ate the apple or burned an apple. That energy will
eventually come out, and so the apple inside the box will get very hot, probably thousands of degrees. Those particles can
start to nuclear-fuse together. This will take a really long time, because nuclear reactions happen incredibly slowly at
thousands of degrees, but eventually it will happen. Your apple has turned into millions of degrees of plasma of fundamental
particles, and it's burning into higher and higher things. Eventually, you'll end up with probably some iron nuclei and lots of
photons. Billions and billions of years later neutrons will decay into protons and other fundamental particles, and then it'll sit
there for a very, very long time. Let's think about the particles, the protons and neutrons, and stuff. What do they do? And
how do they experience this? They are just cranking along, obeying the laws of physics. The state of the box is changing from
one to the other, to the other. So, if there's 10 to the 24 particles in an apple, there's something like 10 to the 10 to the 24
different states that those particles can be in. That's a gigantic number. But it isn't infinite. And what that means is that, if you
let the box sit there for an infinite amount of time, it will use them all up. It will go through every possible state that it can, all
10 to the 10 to the 24 or whatever of them. And eventually, it will start having to reuse states that it's been in before because
there just aren't any more that it can evolve into. And so, if you wait a long time, something will happen. And this is the power
that infinity has over the finite. At some point, you could open the box and there's your apple again. And eventually, it has to.
In fact, every possible thing that could exist in the box will exist. And they will each exist an infinite number of times. And the
most important thing is that we should care about it because we might be in the box. In any finite region of space, like the
observable universe that we now inhabit, there's a finite amount of energy, which is carried by a finite number of particles.
And those finite number of particles can only be arranged in finitely many distinct patterns. Because there are only finitely
many distinct ways that the particles can be arranged, if space does go on infinitely far, the particle pattern has to ultimately
repeat. And that would mean there'd be copies of us out there. There'd be copies of us. An infinite number of copies out there
of us. And Infinitely many of us at very far parts of the universe are doing exactly the same thing that this copy of us is doing.
Copies of me that continue, and copies of me that die at any moment. Anything that can happen will happen an infinite
number of times. Suddenly, we're in the wild. Somewhere there's an Earth in humans, where I'm having this conversation.
Where instead of being very hot right now, it would be air-conditioned. An infinite number of copies where. An elephant
suddenly appears in front of me. There could be our exact universe, but with a different history. Hillary Clinton won the
election. Germany won the war. And on that Earth, the dinosaurs might still rule. I think when a lot of people hear some of
these ideas, they're like, "God, they were just up late drinking and having a good time and came up with this crazy idea cause
they wanted to think it in science fiction." But this is reality-based. If the universe is infinite in extent, there would be an
infinite number of Einsteins in our universe. And some of them would be talking to you and probably be giving much better
answers that I'm giving. According to the general theory of relativity, it is probable that the universe is not infinite but closed
in upon itself. Something like the surface of a sphere. One thing I have learned in a long life. But those other Einsteins, they're
very far away. We may never be in contact with them, because, according to his theory of relativity, nothing can go faster than
186,000 miles per second, which is the speed of light. We have this view of reality. We look at it in front of us. I mean, I see
you, I see that white screen, I see the camera, as they are now. Which means if I see them as all you are now, I see
immediately. The light that comes from all these objects to me arrives instantaneously at infinite speed. Once upon a time, we
did think that perhaps things happened instantaneously and that information between one point and another could be
conveyed in the blink of an eye, in a single instance. No. It doesn't come at infinite speed. It takes some time to come. I don't
see them now. I see the past in reality. Because there's no infinite speed. Let's see this. Ladies and gentlemen, there he is. The
whizzingest wave, the peppiest particle. Philo T. Photon! Move over, Magellan. Philo is primed to perform his most fabulous
feat of derring-do yet. Circumnavigating the globe eight times in a single second. On your mark, Philo. He did it, ladies and
gentlemen. The son of a gun did it! Let's see that again in real-time. Do it again! Encore! And now I'm sure Philo is pooped.
What's this? He's going to fly to the next galaxy and back? No one has ever attempted a stunt like this before. Ladies and
gentlemen, I can't watch! The speed of light is the maximum speed at which anything can travel in the universe. The speed of
light, it's incredibly fast. And the speed of light is horrendously slow. If we wanna travel in the galaxy, it's hard enough, but if
you want to travel in the universe from galaxy to galaxy, we just cannot, because we're too slow. And light is too slow.
Incredibly slow. So, is the universe infinite? It's hard to think what the universe is. We know that we see the universe as many
billion light years, and we know the universe is larger than what we see. We have indications of that. But it could be maybe ten
times larger. Maybe a hundred times larger. There are parts of the universe most probably in which, even if we send a signal
now, it will never get there. So, the universe is very, very, very, very, very big. And it makes our heads spin. I was looking up at
the sky one night and I felt like my life didn't matter. Because it was converting large space to large time. One star after
another star after another star and wondering whether that would keep going forever. I had this sense that the universe
existed a long time before I was born and it would exist a long time after I was dead. And I was just a speck that didn't matter.
It doesn't matter. My parents don't matter. Nothing matters. We're all just specks. We're just living in this brief moment. None
of us were here a million years ago. None of us will be here a million years from now. And the universe doesn't care. It just
goes on and on and on. So, why are we wasting time? For example, going to school, having dentist appointments and all of the
others. Because none of it matters. But, I fell in love and that changed everything and that matters. Even though we might
both be specks in the cosmos. So, one of the oldest questions that thinkers are puzzled on is what would happen in the
universe if I could fly forever? What would happen? In the past, it seemed that there were two alternatives. Both are too
strange. One is that the universe is infinite and I could go forever. And the other is that it's finite and there is a wall. But if
there is a wall, then I could go through the wall, and so what's next? Einstein published a spectacular paper. He said, "No, no,
no. The universe can be finite, but without walls, because if I go in one direction, I keep going, and I come back from the other
direction." Like it happens on the Earth. If I walk on the Earth towards the east, I walk, walk, walk, walk. Do I find a wall? No. Is
Earth infinite? No. What happened? I just came back from the other side. And it's very possible today that the universe in fact
has this shape. Namely, it has no boundary, there's no wall at the end of the universe, but it's finite. Huge, but finite. There's
actually way more ways to make the universe finite, just geometrically, abstractly playing around with whatever you want,
than there are to make it infinite. In fact, there's an infinite number of ways to make the universe finite, and there's really only
a couple of ways to make it infinite. We do know that the universe could be infinite, but we don't actually have a mechanism
to measure an infinite amount of length. And because light travels at a finite speed and the age of the universe is finite, there
will only ever be a finite subset of the universe that we'll ever be able to observe. Whether beyond that it's finite or infinite, we
just will never be able to experimentally know. When we talk about infinity, we can certainly talk about infinity in the extent of
the spatial domain. We can also talk about infinity in the temporal domain. The duration of the universe? It's possible that the
universe will continue expanding into an infinite time in the future. That's what the equations predict, actually. In the past, we
discovered that the universe is not only expanding, but the rate of expansion is accelerating. The galaxies are moving away
from each other with increasing speed. And what this means is that, eventually, we will be cut off from other galaxies. And so,
as the stars in our galaxy eventually burn out as they will, because all of them have a limited amount of nuclear fuel there
eventually will not be any new energy sources in our galaxy. And since we will be cut off from all other galaxies eventually,
maybe about 100 billion years from now there will not be any energy sources at all and life will completely end. So, roughly
100 billion years from now that will be the end of life. And if we keep on going along the cosmological timeline, galaxies,
planets, black holes, everything that we know about, it will all disintegrate. All that would be left at that point are particles
wafting through the darkness. Now, if the universe exists in an infinite amount of time, as we now think that it will, the era of
life is just a sliver of time when you look at the full unfolding of the universe and time. Even though 100 billion years seems
like a long time, it's nothing compared to infinity. Even if human beings make it past this particular immediate crisis, or other
sentient life emerges, there will be a last sentient being. There will be a last living creature. Even if the universe is infinite,
there will be a last thought. A lot of people have this visceral anxiety about not existing. But, personally, I don't have this
feeling. Once I didn't exist, before I was born. There will be a point in time when I don't exist because I'll die. And the same is
true for our species. And all life, all creatures, even the physicists. So, how does it feel? I've always had the opposite reaction,
even to some of the most apocalyptic predictions for the future of the universe. It gives me a great sense of meaning and
connectedness to appreciate that you're part of this grand picture. Nothing is permanent in that sense. And to my mind, that's
freeing. It frees us from this focus on the permanent as the place where value ultimately resides, to a focus on the brief
moment that we have, in which we can understand things, and create beauty, and experience wonder, regardless of how
fleeting that experience may be. That the universe itself gets to have its window of life, its window of consciousness and
beauty and love, and then, poof. It's sort of like the universe as a whole is living the way we do. We're only here for a short
time compared to infinity, and to me, that's a holy thought. I mean, that's as close as I can get to being religious. The gift that
you have of consciousness for the short time that you're here. There are interesting concepts in abstract math where you can
take something that appears to have one characteristic, but you can put it inside something else or put it around something
else and it will look different from that point of view. And in a way, I think that the universe is infinite in some sense,
compared with our own lives, because we just won't be there. We won't be there to see it. Whether it's really infinite or not, I
think that's wonderful. Not knowing doesn't make me sad. For me, not knowing is exciting. There are things that I believe that
our minds can't know, but they are real and they exist. If we want to call that the infinite, if we want to call that spirit, if we
want to call that God, whatever you want to call that thing. I believe that thing is for real, but not knowable. Infinity's very
large. It's too big. To me, infinity is an emotion that we get in front of the immensity of nature. We are little teeny things. We
do science. It's great. I love to do science. Try to figure out the quantum properties of gravity, trying to figure out what is the
shape of the cosmos. But the reality is we are like a little cat trying to understand quantum mechanics. The cat isn't going to
understand quantum mechanics because he has the brain it has. A poor human won't understand everything about the
universe because of a poor brain. The number of neurons in our brain is comparable to the number of stars in the galaxies. It
is immense. Which means that the space of thinkable thoughts is a fantastically big number. It's a one followed by billions of
digits. It's an incredibly large number. Larger than anything we have encountered. But, look at our brain, it's a kilogram of
meat which can be in one configuration or the other, and that's it. You can list all of them in principle. And we have to
confront the fundamental finiteness, not of nature, but of ourselves. I don't know if we are infinite or not. But, for some
reason, thinking about anything about human beings being infinite doesn't seem right to me. Because we feel very bound to
each other. Bounded in our rationality, bounded in our creativity.