OT - Physics Question on Anti-Matter

[Jack Simth]

Suicide Junkie said:
Energy is not being produced in the ionosphere. It just happens to be naturally converted into a convenient form up there. Much like Niagara falls is convenient for hydro plants and sunlight is convenient for plants.
Everything around here except nuclear power comes from the sun. Fission power comes from ancient supernovae.
And both those come from the hydrogen the universe had as far back as we can see.


Re: Stretching infinity
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Say you've got a motel with an infinite number of rooms. On Tuesday it happens to be full up with an infinite number of guests, one per room. (This place is quite popular)

Five guys pull up to the front counter, and the owner says "no problem". He simply gets on the intercom and tells everybody to move five doors to the right. The people in room 1 move to room 6, and the people in room one million move to #1000006, and so on.
Now rooms 1 through 5 are empty, and the guys have a place to stay for the night.

Next, a very large frat shows up... they have an infinite number of members, each of which has a unique odd number on their shirt.
"No problem!" says the owner. He gets on the intercom again, and tells everybody to move to the room with double their current room number.
The person in room 1 moves to room 2, the person in room 2 moves to room 4, and the one in room one million moves to room two million. All the odd numbered rooms are now free and everybody still has their own room.
The frat boys then move into all the odd numbered rooms which match their jerseys.

Ever heard of orders of infinity? The set of counting numbers is an infinite set, and the set of real numbers is an infinite set, but while you can have a function that uniquely assigns every member of the counting number set to the real number set, you can't do it the other way around. The hotel clerks orders can't be followed - all rooms are full.

[Suicide Junkie]

The frat guys have odd numbers, implying integers. Same as door numbers. There is no problem.
Now, if the frat had used points on a line instead of jersey numbers, then there would be a problem, but they didn't. Fractions would have been fine too.

The whole point of that was to demonstrate stretching an infinite amount of something.
All those people who were neighbours before the move, now have one frat guy between them and are two doors away from their old neighbour. And everybody does fit.

[rdouglass]

If I may jump in...

It doesn't matter whether the frat boys need odd numbered rooms or not; there are an infinite number of them. There are an infinite number of rooms and as long as there is at least 1 person in the hotel, there would not be enough rooms. There is no such thing as infinity + 1. Infinity is infinity. Period. You cannot add to infinity.

At least that's the way it was when I took Calculus and Engineering courses anyways...

[Suicide Junkie]

There is no such thing as infinity +1 because infinity is not a number.

The hotel thing works;
Given that the people follow the owner's instructions in regards to changing rooms, there will never be a room conflict, and everybody will indeed fit.

The person in room 1 moves to room 2. There is nobody in room 2 because that person moved to room 4. Person 2 was able to move into room 4 because *that* person moved into room 8.
The person in room 3 moves to room 6. Person 6 moved to room 12, and 12 to 24.

Everybody leaves their room. And each person is given a unique new room number to move into. One person per room, and nobody left without a room. Therefore everybody fits.

Infinity is funny that way
The set of positive, even integers (the original guests in their new rooms) is the same size as the set of all positive numbers (the original guests ... and also the original guests in new rooms plus the frat boys)