To Infinity And Beyond: Clot Summary

I must admit, when I started reading the first chapter of the ebook To Infinity and Beyond: Journeys of the Mind and Spirit, by Dr. Kent A. Bessey, I immediately thought of the Pixar movie, Toy Story. This is the catch phrase of Buzz Lightyear, a main character from the movie. Being a line repeatedly quoted, I’m sure most haven’t tried to understand its true meaning. While I have often pondered the idea of infinity, I have never given the thought to infinity being mathematically computed. I have always thought that infinity was infinity and that there is no logical, let alone mathematical, theory to comprehend this phenomenon. Presented in the first chapter of this eBook is a theory presented by Georg Cantor, a German mathematician, which attempts to explain the mathematics of the infinite. Cantor “discovered a remarkable realm where half of a pie is as large as the whole, infinity comes in different sizes, and miracles are mathematically plausible” (Bessey 10). Coming from a religious standpoint, this theory broadens my comprehension of
After this, he tests to see if he could then pair the objects in each set. Both claims are proven true. Cantor's set theory uses infinity in the form of infinite cardinal numbers, a number where any method of counting the sets using it gives the equivalent result, proving that “a part can be as large as the whole” (Bessey 12). After working with smaller sets, Cantor began testing power sets, which are the collection of all of the subsets of a set. From there he tested the infinite possibilities of dimensions and planes. While a lot of this theory is still hard for me to comprehend from a mathematical and logical perspective and makes my head spin, it helps me to better understand my personal belief that my existence is infinite and how I can get to that answer, while never reaching the final