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  • 7 months later...
Posted

A book has been written on this subject, available online:

The Advantages of Bringing Infinity to a Finite Place:

Penrose Diagrams as Objects of Intuition

 

The basic idea of Penrose diagrams arose from his desire to be able to deal with quantities at infinity even though ‘‘there is no such thing as a point at infinity.”

His use of dots and other diagrammatic treatment was intended to make difficult concepts, such as infinity “tractable and place-able at the cost of reconfiguring the basic concepts of relativistic space and time.”

Mathematical formalism containing references to infinity, fails to generate a mental image of the concept while the image, as depicted by a Penrose diagram, fails to depict the formalism. However, the two elements combined help to create understanding.

That is the value of Penrose diagrams; connections between infinity and elsewhere were literally drawn, (often using dots) and the physics student literally placed a universe on a page, bringing infinity to a finite place.

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