Hi, I still remember my senior year in high school,
way back in 1982, when our promising basketball
season came to an abrupt end with an upset loss.
It was painful. After the game, our coach reminded
us, the sun will come up tomorrow. At the time,
I think he was trying to help us see perspective.
Even though our world felt shaken in the moment,
Larger realities continued beyond our disappointment.
The sun still rose and the stars still filled
the sky. And over time, I've come to appreciate
how deeply human that experience is. There's
something comforting about patterns that persist.
Something hopeful about realizing that beneath
the unexpected changes in life, something deeper
remains. If we recap our week on infinity, we
began with a simple question about prime numbers
and slowly discovered that infinity was far stranger
and richer than it first appeared. Not just more
and more, but something with its own structure
and logic. And one of the most remarkable parts
of this story is that humanity did not invent
these ideas. We discovered them. Across centuries
and cultures, people kept encountering the same
truths about infinity and gradually learned how
to describe them. To me, that is one of the beautiful
stories of human history. Because when we humans
are left only to ourselves, we often drift towards
stories of conflict, division, and destruction.
But when we bind ourselves to truth, logic, and
reason, something different can happen. We can
build together. Step by step, humanity uncovered
deeper truths about infinity and built an extraordinary
structure of understanding across centuries.
And the deeper we explored, the more it began
to feel like we were seeing fingerprints. Not
something random or shallow, but traces of meaning
woven into reality itself. Sometimes when I look
at the stars at night, something about it speaks
to me. Part of it is the sheer vastness of it
all. The number of stars. The immense distances.
The realization that the universe is far larger
than my everyday experience. There is something
about that kind of vastness that stirs wonder.
And thinking about infinity in mathematics stirs
something similar in me. Except now, we are not
talking about an unimaginably large number. We
are talking about something truly without end.
Something beyond every boundary we can imagine.
And yet somehow, through mathematics, Humanity
has been able to glimpse pieces of it, to study
it, to reason about it, to uncover patterns within
it. To me, I enter a mindset of awe because it
suggests that reality is not shallow. It is deep,
structured, even creative. And perhaps the question
is not simply whether the sun will come up tomorrow.
Maybe the deeper question is if infinity in mathematics
is not merely more and more, but something fundamentally
different, then what might that mean when we
think about eternity? When we hear phrases like
everlasting life or infinite time, perhaps they
are not only describing quantity, but a different
kind of reality altogether. Something beyond
our present intuition. Maybe that is the part
of what makes infinity so meaningful. Not because
mathematics answers every question, but because
it stretches our imagination towards realities
larger than ourselves. To me, this does not feel
overwhelming, but inviting. and even hopeful.
This is Intersecting Us.