“Highly engaging. . . . [Barrow] brings his charm and wit to bear. . . . [He] introduces novel twists and turns, and presents [the] material in refreshing ways.”–Nature
"Eloquent. . . . Succinct. . . . Barrow [has the] remarkable ability to provide clear, concise, engaging and distinctly finite explanations–even when describing some fairly advanced concepts. . . . [An] engaging read."–San Francisco Chronicle
"Clever and insightful. . . . [A] lively history of infinity through the ages."–Entertainment Weekly
“Entertaining. . . . Remarkably lucid and not the least mind-boggling. . . . His clear, engaging style manages to illuminate abstruse matters…. This is a useful guide to an endlessly fascinating subject.” –American Scientist
Preface
1 Much Ado about Everything
The Rough Guide to Infinity
Intimations of the Infinite
Zeno Hour
2 Infinity, Almost and Actual, Fictitious and Factual
Darkness at Noon
A Purely Aristotelian Relationship
Infinity and God
A Little Kant
3 Welcome to the Hotel Infinity
Hotels
Experiences of the Hotel Infinity
The Hotel Infinity’s Accounts
4 Infinity Is Not a Big Number
An Immaculate Misconception
Albert of Saxony’s Paradox
Galileo’s Paradox
Cadmus and Harmonia
Terminator 0, 1⁄2, and 1
Countable Infinities
Uncountable Infinities
The Towering Infinito
5 The Madness of Georg Cantor
Cantor and Son
The Chronicle of Kronecker
Cantor, God, and Infinity – the Trinity with Affinity
All’s Sad that Ends Bad
6 Infinity Comes in Three Flavours
Triple Top
Let’s Get Physical
Naked Infinities
The Great Blue Yonder
Infinity on the Back Foot
7 Is the Universe Infinite?
Everything That Is
Cosmology Goes Underground
Bent Universes
The Problem of Topology
The Problem of Uniformity
The Problem of Acceleration
Where Does This Leave Us?
The Shining
8 The Infinite Replication Paradox
A Universe Where Nothing Is Original
The Great Escape
The Temporal Version – Been There, Done That
The Never-ending Story
The Ethics of the Infinite
9 Worlds Without End
Other Worlds in History
Out of This World
Inflation – Here, There, and Everywhere
Conscious Interventions – Men in Black
Simulated Universes
How Should We Then Live?
10 Making Infinity Machines
Super-tasks
Rubbing Thomson’s Lamp
Some Norse Code
The End-game Problem
Relativity and the Amazing Shrinking Man
A Matter of Timing
Newtonian Super-tasks
Relativistic Super-tasks
Big Bangs and Big Crunches
11 Living Forever
Childhood’s End
The Sociology of Eternity
The Problem-Page of the Unending Future
The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten
Incestuous Time Travel
The Grandmother Paradox
Consistent Histories
Tourists From the Future Time Travellers in the Financial World:
Perpetual Money Machines
Why You Can’t Change the Past
Infinity – Where Will It All End?
Notes
Index
