Do you believe in infinity? I mean really believe!

[All talks are free to attend.] Newton’s discovery of the calculus allowed the concept of infinity (in the form of infinitesimals) to be hard baked into his equations of motion. But in classical physics, for the most part, we can replace infinitesimals with small but finite numbers and the predictions more or less stay the same. However, things are very different in quantum mechanics. Here the continuum of real and complex numbers plays a vital role and the theory cannot be approximated by…