You must have come across the word ‘infinity’. Maybe you’ve heard it in Marvel’s universe (Marvel movies), where ‘infinity stones’ (the most powerful gems) control time, space and reality. But in real life, infinity is a mind-bending idea that simply means something that never ends — no matter how far you go, there’s always more.

It’s basically a concept, an idea of something that keeps going forever, bigger than any number you can name and longer than any list you can finish. In normal life, it’s like time, space or a common interpretation as “infinity is like forever”, but no one actually gets it. Or even if they do, they cannot express it in words.

Let’s come to the maths again, here infinity messes with you when you’re trying to divide stuff; for instance, if you take 1 and divide it by smaller and smaller numbers, like 0.1, 0.01, 0.0001, it just keeps going higher and higher until it becomes “infinity.” It doesn’t boom, it’s more like your calculator just shows “Error” and you know you’ve gone too far.

And if you start counting, start at 1, 2, 3, 4… keep going. No matter how long you count, you’re never done. Even if you count your whole life. Even if you live 500 years. You’ll never be done. That’s infinity.

And for mathematicians, “there’s more than one infinity.” Which sounds unacceptable at first because how can you have more than endless (i.e. infinity). But apparently there’s “countable infinity” and “uncountable infinity.” Like the set of all whole numbers is infinite but still smaller than the set of all real numbers. And yes, this is the part where my brain starts giving me ‘not responding’ messages, because I am not a math person. And honestly, here I think mathematicians are people from another world.

But to make you understand this mind-boggling concept, imagine you’ve got all the natural numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4… going on forever. That’s one kind of infinity. Now imagine all the numbers between 1 and 2. Not just the neat ones like 1.1 or 1.11, but every possible decimal you can think of such as, 1.473891, 1.00000000027, 1.6180339887… and more…. There are so many that you couldn’t list them all, even if you try for your whole life. Basically, the space between two numbers is like its own never-ending universe. (Coffee, anyone?)

Infinity is all around us — in numbers, in nature, even in ideas. Let’s explore this endless mystery.

Our universe is another example of infinity; like space just keeps going and going, there is no end to it. Isn’t it unsettling because if space doesn’t end, then… what’s out there? More galaxies? More planets and then more space, so yes, infinite universe.

Some people say infinity shows up in nature too. Like fractals, those patterns where you zoom in and they just keep repeating forever. For example, tree branches keep splitting into smaller branches or the veins on a leaf splitting into tiny and more complex ones.

And what’s more common these days is doom scrolling. That’s basically a man-made infinity trap. TikTok videos and Instagram reels, they never end. You think “I’ll just watch for five minutes” and then you look up and it’s dark outside and you’ve basically spent two or more hours and it’s still going. That’s infinity eating your time!

Whether we understand it or not, infinity actually helps scientists comprehend complexities, like black holes and their centres called singularities with infinite density. In maths, infinity shows up in calculus, it’s when you break things into tinier and tinier pieces, to get accurate answers. This is quite helpful for scientists and engineers to figure out how stuff moves and works in real life. Moreover, if you are into video gaming, then you must have seen some games having “infinite maps”, where no matter how far you walk, the world keeps generating new areas.

Apart from the complexities, infinity can be comforting, too. Like when people say “the possibilities are infinite”, it means anything could happen. That there’s no limit to how good things could get.

So yeah, infinity is everywhere: in numbers, space, nature and your social media reels. You can’t reach it, you can’t touch it, but you know it’s there. And the more you think about it, the more you realise your brain has a limit, but infinity doesn’t.

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 16th, 2025