So why are today’s physicists and mathematicians so enamored with infinity that it’s almost never questioned? Basically, because infinity is an extremely convenient approximation, and we haven’t discovered good alternatives. For example, consider the air in front of you. Keeping track of the positions and speeds of octillions of atoms would be hopelessly complicated. But if you ignore the fact that air is made of atoms and instead approximate it as a continuum, a smooth substance that has a density, pressure and velocity at each point, you find that this idealized air obeys a beautifully
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