It’s kind of odd, how widely misunderstood the idea of infinity is; or, if the concept itself is understood, its implications are not. Clearly, Buzz Lightyear was a nutjob who thought you could travel beyond ‘infinity’. Unfortunately, many if not most people are just as ridiculous.

One common misconception, for example, is the treatment of infinity as a number. Really, folks, just because something is used in mathematics doesn’t make it a number. Arguments that devolve from “uh-huh” and “nuh-uh” to “uh-huh TIMES INFINITY” and “nuh-huh TIMES INFINITY PLUS ONE”, though (hopefully) not reflective of the true intellect of those involved, exacerbates the false definition.

Another mistake: an infinite universe necessitates infinite matter within the universe, arrange in infinite arrangements. It’s surprising how many people would be amazed to hear that, assuming our universe is infinitely expanding, there is NO reason to believe that somewhere out there aliens exist. One begins to think these people are the same who mishandled ‘infinity’ in math, as well; anyone who has divided one by three can find an infinite sequence with a finite variety of numerals.

I realize at this point that nobody cares how many other people misuse vocabulary; after all, modern society spits on language in favor of looking like a moron on the internet. Strange value systems aside, I think the concept of ‘infinity’ is much more important than grammatical crimes, and society’s inability to understand it speaks a lot about our breadth of mind.

Of course, it may not seem like it matters, given that people have been making the same mistakes for eons. Yet humankind is spreading at a frightening rate; advances in information technology, communications, transportation, and other fields have massively increased the reach of each person. Before widespread sea travel came around, a person in Europe could be completely mistaken as to how far the Americas were, and it wouldn’t really make a difference to everyday life. But those distances became important as improving capabilities put them within reach. Same deal with air travel. Now, as society eyes the ‘final frontier’ of space, a true understanding of what space really entails is becoming more relevant.

Such a literal context, however, might make it seem insignificant; we’re not vacationing to the moon yet, after all. In that case, consider the somewhat recent movement for people to become ‘global citizens’. Belonging to the Earth instead of a nation, it is said, would promote responsibility to treat the planet well, as well as sympathy towards others far away from you. In my opinion, the realization that an infinite universe does not automatically supply us with another inhabitable planet is a frightening and much more effective way to put our planet’s ills in context. It makes you realize how small, fragile, and unique the Earth truly is, and how moronic it is for us to blindly mistreat it.

Also, it means all those people studying stars that are millions of light-years away are wasting their time. That’s like dreaming of a space shuttle before the steam engine was invented. Let’s get that space elevator up and running, and connect it to a lunar colony. That sounds better to me.

(That is not the title of another Jane Austen novel)

If you were to tell me that all truths are relative, would not that truth be absolute? And then, if you had previously believed that there are no absolute truths, until my paradoxical question changed your mind, would that not also destroy the previously established truth? To restate the problem, one would say: It is a TRUTH that all truths are relative. If it were not a truth, it would by definition no longer hold true; yet if it were, it would be absolute, and thus equally untrue.

It’s a ridiculous scenario, a Schrodinger’s Cat of semantics. And strange as the idea may be, the parallel here is uncanny; what we face is not a problem of different opinions or world views, but instead, the impossibility of quantum linguistics. Unfortunately, a google search reveals that this not-so-clever term has already been coined, and is used to mean things which I’m not quite sure I understand (see: http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~joseph/dis/dis/node35.html). I simply intended it to be a phrasal portmanteau of quantum mechanics and linguistics, and I shall use it as such.

We’ll begin with mechanics, returning again to the dead-and-alive cat. Nobody in their right minds (or so thought Schrodinger) would interpret the scenario as a plausible argument for the existence of a cat who is both living and dead; instead, it was a scientific reductio ad absurdum which sought to disprove a common conception of quantum physics through expounding upon its absurd conclusions. Little did anyone expect for it–along with a menagerie of related questions involving trees falling in forests–to be seriously considered as a pseudo-ontological issue. But as it turned out, people still ignore years of complex mathematics and theoretical physics to entertain the notion of quasi-dead animals. In the words of Stephen Hawking, “when I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun.”

However, as violence is frowned upon, we will forgo the firearm and continue the misapplication of quantum theory to linguistics. If we use a simplified version of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (the interpretation that inspired the killing of cats in the name of science), we could posit that language, or more specifically, the meaning of words, has multiple possible meanings that could be true, until its actual meaning is determined by an observer. Meaning that, in an abstract discussion, truth can be at the same time both relative and absolute, neatly solving our conundrum.

Except not. As with theoretical physics, it only seems to work in the abstract; when it’s brought to a medium we can perceive, be that a cat or a conversation, the quantum principles that allow for multiple existences seemingly crumble. Thus, a new solution is called for, and I’ve got a radical new idea. I realize it’s nearly an extremist view, but sometimes that’s what it takes. Here goes.

We need to expand our vocabularies.

Language is fluid, dynamic, adaptive. Words are made and used and wasted liberally; just look at Shakespeare. Yet despite the infinite capability of language to give us just the right word to say what we mean, we revert to using slang, or catch-phrases, or try to imitate the words of others–in short, our speech has been morphed for the purpose of manipulation. Why is the abortion debate between pro-life and pro-choice? Because pro-death and anti-choice don’t sound too appealing in a political advertisement. Why do people disagree over what constitutes truth? Because why would you say “opinion” when you could sound so much more authoritative saying “fact”? It’s a degradation of rhetoric and a perversion of communication, but it’s what presses the right buttons for those in the audience.

It’s pretty absurd to say “a false opinion, held by enough people, is factually correct”. Yet it doesn’t seem so absurd to say “truth is determined by what people believe”. It makes me wonder if those who spouted the latter would defend the former.

Now as for tolerance, I’ve only one request: tolerate the intolerant. Trying to change their beliefs does not qualify.

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Here’s some links to things I’d have talked about had I the time and energy and patience and etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebniz