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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries
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To: jim black who wrote (18235)4/16/2002 5:49:15 PM
From: AC Flyer  Read Replies (3) of 74559
 
>>The conclusion is inescapable. Human knowledge in so far as it can be written down (and presumsably translated from there to any other human language, is FINITE! There is a theoretical limit to what we are ABLE to know.<<

There are two problems with your proof, Jim. First, 36 to the 75th power (the finite number of sets) is a very large number - a very, very large number. Far larger than the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth, far larger than the number of stars in the known Universe. To most folks, 36 to the 75th is a good approximation of infinity.

Second, while to a pure mathematician 36th to the 75th is very definitely NOT infinity, you have designed your proof to yield the "not infinite" result by limiting the size of each set to 75 elements. Any number that is factorable (as in a finite number of finite sets) is not infinity. Remove the limit from the set size and you get "an infinite number of infinite sets" yielding the "infinite" result.

Contemporary quantum physics provides the strongest support for the "infinite" result, imo, as the old ideas of matter consisting of a finite number of indivisible particles is being replaced by the idea that every particle is composed of smaller particles, which require higher and higher energy experiments to reveal. Fractal mathematics is a variation on this theme.

I'm in the infinite camp.

Good day today, huh? Mr. Market doesn't need much of an excuse to ramp. Dumb old Mr. Market just refuses to do what it's "supposed" to do.
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