R

E

A

D

 

T

H

I

N

K

 

C

R

E

A

T

E

 

clip_image001

 

 

                  

 

.. this is how we imagine the world truly is: a cover, and ultimately does not have a separate object, molecular, atomic, electronic, or wide, but any time in the past more details, as partless as oceans, where our small prism duty to defend the spray up soon be inundated. As we have continuity in the picture, in the material world, from rock between stones, rocks and stones, pebbles of stone, sand to fill in the gaps, therefore, we can see that, in the space between the distillate integer and fractional, "small" means the denominator become infinite.

 

clip_image002

 

 

clip_image003

 

 

Chaos and Order

 

 

“I had removed the black earth’s boundary stones: Once she had been enslaved and now was free.” This is what Solon, the great Athenian lawgiver, wrote some twenty-five hundred years ago. Taking boundaries away, however, can lead from fusion to confusion and so to chaos. We know where we are when our thoughts, like our words, are sharply defined.

 

The Greeks had a word for the infinite and it was apeiron (απειρον), which literally meant “without boundary” and translates equally well into “indefinite”. Why should they, why should we, so concern ourselves with the endless, when it may only amount to the vague? Anaximander, who lived a hundred and fifty years before Socrates, recognized the foolishness of claiming that one element or another — earth, air, fire, water — was the source of everything else. Rather, he said, the source is the apeiron — as if distinction rose out of indistinction, the way it does in so many creation myths. We think this way still, seeing speciation on a grand scale evolving from the unspecified, and minutely differentiated tissues from stem cells.

 

The infinite disguised as the indefinite is our only begetter. But in this same guise it is how we imagine the world truly to be: made up ultimately not of separate objects, molecules, atoms, electrons, or quanta, but, past the ever more granular, to be as partless as the ocean, where our little prisms of selves spray up and soon enough submerge. Just as we picture continuity in the material world by rocks between boulders, stones between rocks, pebbles between stones, and sand to fill in the crevices, so we see fractions in the spaces between integers—and for fractions “ever smaller” means denominators becoming infinitely large. If the heavens are full; if everything flows; if time is a river: then not only how we began but how we go on is drenched in that ambiguous apeiron.

 

“Tell me if ever anything was finished,” da Vinci scribbled again and again over his late drawings of tumbling chaos. He tried to give some form to this chaos by representing it as cascades and waves and whirlpools, since their immensity was at least shaped by comprehensible forces. Our hope is to find some structure to the infinite, behind what might be only superficial indefinition: regularities governing infinite ensembles; powers,  dominions... among its blurred degrees. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

— Robert Kaplan, Ellen Kaplan, The Art of the Infinite - The Pleasures of Mathematics, Interlude – The Infinite and the Indefinite

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indexes/04

 

 

clip_image004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 comments:

Sprit O said...

Consider national borders, but from the integration can lead to confusion, chaos. We know where we are, as we think, what we say, are sharply defined.

O truth of the earth,
O truth of things,
I am determined to press my way toward you;
Sound your voice!

I scale mountains,
or dive in the sea after you.

Walt Whitman
po.t-pog.com - the text-only version of this site for quick browsing and better search results.

onwardpress.wordpress.com – text-only wordpress version