Approaching Infinity

The title is the title of a book by Michael Huemer, which I read most of, but not all. It’s good in parts. It addresses infinity in several ways. He presents many paradoxes involving infinity and gives his solutions for some of them. He discusses Cantor’s diagonal arguments (see my previous post for one). He doesn’t seem to wholly agree with them, but he doesn’t argue against them either.

He does challenge Cantor concerning Galileo’s paradox. “The puzzle is that there is a compelling argument both that the two sets are equally numerous (the one-to-one correspondence argument), and that one set is larger than the other (for the squares are a proper subset of the natural numbers). Cantor embraces the first of these arguments and rejects the second. His only justification for this is fiat: he proposes to simply define the relations ‘equal to’, ‘greater than’, and ‘less than’ using the one-to-one correspondence criterion.

     Of course, one could not consistently brace both of the arguments Galileo mentions, since they entail contradictory results. But Cantor’s decision to embrace only the one-to-one correspondence argument is not the only alternative. One could embrace the proper-subset argument while rejecting the one-to-one correspondence argument. Or one could, like Galileo, reject both arguments and hold that ‘greater than’, ‘less than’, and ‘equal to’ relations do not apply to pairs of infinite sets. Cantor does not argue for his alternative over the others” (6.9.4).

Huemer did not say one could embrace the proper subset argument for comparing the integers and the rationals.

The weakest parts of the book in my opinion were about the empty set and geometric points.

Huemer misses the strongest reason for having the concept of an empty set. The two major operations on sets are union and intersection. The first forms a new set by combining the members of two or more sets. The second forms a new set by identifying the common members of two or more sets. Say we have set A = {1, 2, 3} and set B = {3, 4, 5}. The intersect of A and B is {3}. But what if B = {4, 5, 6}? Then A and B have no common members. In other words, the intersect of A and B is nothing, i.e. the empty set { }, often symbolized as {∅}. In other words, the empty set is needed to make defined operations complete. It is similar to a need for the number zero, for example 5 – 5 = 0.

Huemer is frustrated with geometric points. He says they are unimaginable, because they have size zero, yet they are supposed to be the building blocks of other geometrical objects (11.2).

I regard the building block perspective as from the wrong direction. Start with 3-dim space, e.g. a cube. Then disregard one dimension to get 2-dim space (a square plane), disregard another dimension to get 1-dim space (a line), and finally to 0-dim space (a point). Alternatively, each intersection of two lines of the square is a point.

Later in the book there is a section (14.6.3) about points as locations. He does not have any arguments against this view, but he doesn’t endorse it either and says he doesn’t understand it. 

In my opinion it is the best view. We often hear people say things like how to get from point A to point B. More concretely it might mean driving a route from one location, such as a town, to another location, another town. In the context of geometry, a point is a location in Cartesian or polar coordinates. For example, the point (2,3) in 2-dim Cartesian coordinates means 2 units to the right of the origin (0, 0) or y-axis and 3 units above the x-axis. Of course, Euclid’s Elements did not have this perspective, since Cartesian coordinates were invented much later.