I wonder.....

[vegan_chick]

yeah, and wouldn't there be an alternate universe for every period of time, too, where else would you go during time travel? and time can be divided into infinate portions, down to fractions of fractions of fractions of fractions of fractions of milliseconds (get my point). and I am wondering wether there are different intensities of infinity, or if infinite is just infinite, But I don't think that anything is infinite unless it repeats like a cycle, or ends eventually, but cannot be proven to have ended at all because humans can't stay around long enough to prove it experimentally, like when a branch falls off of a tree, and no one is around to hear it, it still made a sound, but it can't be proved. (hey, I should start a topic about that)!

[Gryphon]

And everyone of your fractions of milleseconds of time can branch out in an infinate amount of possibilities.

Pi, think about pi. Itn goes on and on forever; people have not found it to repeat or terminate, so we assume it's an irrational number, which means it never repeats and never terminates. You can't write it as a fraction or a decimal, so some funny mathematician named it with a Greek letter. Other infinites:
Points on a circle
Points on a line
Points on a line segment
Points on a plane
Points on anything because a point is infinately thin! So what can you call a point? An infinately thin point in time? The smallest of small fractions of milleseconds? That's infinately thin.

[Zgirl]

My head hurts you guys are confusing me. Infinite, planes, universes!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Nathan]

Gryphon: "Assume" that pi is irrational? You don't need to --it's been proven! (Sorry, but I can get rather worked up over these things.) In fact, not only is pi irrational, it's also transcendental, though I haven't seen the proof of this --reasonably elementary proofs of the irrationality of pi and e as well as the transcendentality of e are given in Michael Spivak's classic Calculus (3rd edition). My guess is that the "funny mathematician" was Leonhard Euler (given how much mathematical notation we owe to him), but I can't be sure (actually it looks as if Euler didn't originate calling the area of the unit circle pi [that honor goes to William Jones], but that his use of this notation assured that it would become the standard one --see, e.g., the MathWorld entry on pi).

Vegan: There are indeed different degrees of infinity (as Wilf alluded to above). The smallest is Aleph[0] (the cardinality [i.e., 'number' of elements] of the set of integers and thus, amazingly enough, of the set of rational numbers!), then Aleph[1] (the cardinality of the real numbers) and continuing on up (I seem to remember that the cardinality of the set of smooth [differentiable?] functions is greater than Aleph[1], but I may very well be wrong, as set theory is not one of my stronger suits in mathematics). Also, a good many physicists think that time and space may not be continuous, but quantized (on scales of about the Planck time and Planck length, respectively), which would prohibit infinite divisions of time. Re branches falling and not being observed: It depends on what you mean by "sound," I suppose, as a propagating disturbance in the air will always be created by a branch hitting the ground, and there will, ipso facto, always be matter there to 'hear' it.

Semiramis: It seems to me (not thinking too hard about this, though) that vacuum fluctuations in non-quantized (i.e., continuous) spacetime would generate an infinite number (in fact a uncountably infinite number, contrary to Wilf's intuition) of alternate universes, though, as I indicated above, spacetime is actually thought to be quantized, so, with that hypothesis (and the assumption that the universe had no existence [or at least not an infinite one] before the 'Big Bang'), I think you are indeed correct about the number of alternate universes (well, at least those generated in this quantum mechanical "many-worlds interpretation" manner) being very large, but finite.

Nathan

[Rysade]

My C++ teacher told me about a story he read. It was based on the idea that if space is infinite, then all possible things must exist, or something. If that's so, then there's a repeat of you and I out there, doing the same things we're doing right now. The only problem is, that the two uses are so far apart, we would never know each other exist. However, if we had a telescope pointed in the right direction, and happened to be watching the edge of the universe unfold as light from it reached us, then we might actually spot ourselves. It was something like that anyway. The idea was that alternate universes didn't need to exist in another dimension, but could exist right next door. They would be just out of view. You can't know if there's a copy of you just over the edge of the known universe, can you?

However, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says that the population of the universe is 0. That is because there is a limited amount of people, n and an unlimited amount of space. Therefore, the average population of the universe is nThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is also frequently wrong in just about everything you might happen to ask it.

[vegan_chick]

Thank you for clarifying that for me, Nathan. (Even though knowing both sides caused me to become more confused, but oh well, there is only so much information an eleven-year old can handle, not considering Dairine, of course.)

[dmsherwood53]

Hey nobody ever watched SLIDERS on the TV .I've seen maybe 2 episodes but it seems the general concept

[Rysade]

I Really Really wish I had a chance to see more of Sliders. It was such a great concept... Excellent idea for science fiction. Better than Quantum Leap, anyway.

[drea]

My theory involves life starting as a single timeline, and then as each person makes a universal split, one with one decision, and one with the other (this could of course be altered if there are more than 2 options). Thus, the number of universes are being increased exponantially.

I may have to write a story

[Birdhead]

I saw Sliders a few times, ages and ages ago. it used to be on Channel 4, but like a lot of cool programmes on C4 before it got really streamlined, it was canned. (Deepwater, for example. okay, it wasn't much of an adaptation, but it was still cool... C4 used to be the sci-fi, non-main-stream channel. Now it's just music. )

As for multiple universes- I was thinking about this the other night, and most of it isn't really relevant- I'm just a trousers of Time person, with the coda that I think it has to be a fairly large change to create a whole new timeline or Trouserleg. But I was thinking a bit about the Grandfather paradox, and what I think would happen is that when you kill your grandfather, you create a new trouserleg into whihc you have shifted. It means that you can never get back to your original timeline, I think... but your original timeline remains unchanged.

[Midori Ren]