How Does Infinity Become Smaller? | Hawking

[veryyoung]

I have heard that hawking thinks that space is contracting or will be contracting. my question is how do you make infinity smaller? no matter what number you go to from infinity it would still be infinitely smaller than infinity correct? so this would only work in a finite universe which most people have discredited believing it to be impossible. so is hawking trying to say that the universe is finite?

 

[uranium_235]

Finite universe has not been discredited.

 

[Gza]

I have heard that hawking thinks that space is contracting

I always thought that space was going perm soon!

 

[RAD4921]

Infinity and Hawkings

Stephan Hawkins once speculated that the universe is finite but unbounded, like the surface of the Earth. You can walk around the surface of the Earth forever but you eventually come back to the same place you started. This is not implying that the geometry of the universe is any type of sphere. Hawking was just using the Earth as an analogy.

Though infinities exist in mathematics, there is no proof that infinities exist in the natural world. When scientist try to constuct a model of the universe they become distrustful of their work when they run into infinities. Infinities are somewhat ugly to physicist.