X-Message-Number: 22002
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 07:17:19 -0700
Subject: No Physical Infinity
From: Peter Merel <>

Michael C Price writes,

> When a charged particle accelerates it emits an inifinite (alepth_0)
> number of real photons.  This is known as the infrared divergence,
> and is an example of where nature realises an infinity.

It's a matter of choice of representation. Any physical number 
represents three ontologies - unit, metric, and value. If these are 
each distinguished as some fraction of the entire universe of 
description accessible to your sensors, then no infinity would be 
necessary to characterize the result of an experiment.

Most people prefer to represent and juggle infinities for the 
convenience of employing traditional analytic math. There may be 
advantages to reformulating analysis to eliminate the use of infinity 
... but this is not a trivial program.

Peter Merel.

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