94. The Monstrous Universe

When two infinities collide, do they cancel each other out or do they combine to create something even more monstrous?

One infinity by itself is already a monster, for it goes beyond anything we can imagine or comprehend. It transcends both the real and the imaginary. It escapes all of our usual systems, all of our usual rules and practices. It could easily behave in ways that are unpredictable or intractable.

Of our two infinities, one we might call the immovable wall, though it has many names. The other we might call the unstoppable force, though it is equally polynymous. Be careful not to mistake these names for actual qualities, for these infinities are not only not walls or forces, they are nothing physical at all.

The two then collide, but the word “collide” also seems to imply something physical, while the coincidence of two infinities is not a physical collision, but a further thing we cannot comprehend. Were these just physical forces or mathematical symbols, we might expect opposite magnitudes to cancel out, but these are real infinities and they are monsters. The outcome of the coincidence of the two might be just as paradoxical and absurd as the infinities themselves. And genuine absurdity means anything is possible, even the collapse of the world as we know it.

But the outcome might be more pedestrian. For the coincidence of infinities seems to occur regularly throughout our world. Infinities of time and space, infinities of possibility and necessity, infinities of virtual and real are ever present and coincident. As a simple example, there are an infinite number of points between any two given points but the amount of space is also finite and can be traversed in an infinite number of moments that also make up a finite amount of time.

The world seems totally unbothered by paradox and absurdity. Perhaps these are its very foundations. Perhaps it is really these collisions of infinities that make the world anything at all. Perhaps the created monster, the ultimate infinity that consumes and contains all the others, is nothing other than the universe itself.