Finite

What is infinity? We can understand it as a concept, at least if we don't dwell too deep into it. Infinity is widely used in math and it has a symbol for it, ∞. Math knows how to handle infinity and statistics uses infinity in many of its assumptions. In computer science the term infinity is both a blessing and a curse, but it's certainly in use, both in theory and in practice.

The question is, does infinity exist in real life? It does exist in math, but math is not "real"; It exists in statistics, but you cannot find a group or a population the size of infinity to test on; You can program an infinite recursive functions or loops, but you will eventually stop the recursion when you run out of resources, and stop the loop when you get bored.

The physical world is not infinite. There is a limited amount of energy and matter, which is always kept. Yes, matter can be converted to energy and vice versa, but the sum of them won't change. The universe did not always exists, it has an age, which the current estimates put at around 13 billion years. Even the basic building stones of matter are not infinitely small: the Ancient Greeks have suspected that there are indivisible and called them atoms. Modern science found much smaller particles but again, according to most theories we are getting close to the final particles, the most basic building blocks, which cannot be divided.

So science claims that the universe is neither infinitely small nor infinitely big, you can travel through it at a finite speed and it has a limited amount of energy and mass. But what happens if we leave science and rationality? There, we will find infinity. God is not limited by nature. God knows all, god has infinite mercy, god can create a stone which he cannot lift and then lift it anyway.

Infinity does not exist, but the universe is so vast, so old and the speed of light is so fast that we cannot actually comprehend it. We consider the distance between us and the moon to be big, but it's actually just a little over one second at the speed of light. The universe is at least 45 billion light years. The average person in the western world lives 80 years and it seems like a lot of time, but the universe is 172 million times older than that. The Bugatti Veyron is a very fast car, but the speed of light is 2.5 million times faster. These numbers are so mindbogglingly big that they might as well be infinite.

But they are not and the ∞ represents something that doesn't actually exist. And when we understand it, I believe that we will see the world in a whole new light.