“I’m bigger because I know how small I am.”

 

Sounds cosmic. In fact, that’s what philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein tells us in the Netflix documentary A Trip to Infinity. Thinking about infinity, she describes the peculiar pleasure of recognizing how small we are while discovering that the human mind can nevertheless reach toward something “explosively large.” She has been chasing that feeling, she says, her entire life.

 

We meet theoretical physicist Delilah Gates, who got an early start. She was a small child, sitting under the dining-room table and counting, when she realized that she could keep going. There was no last number. Alan Lightman, a physicist whose work challenges us to think about science in human terms, was about ten when he encountered the same idea from a different direction. Looking into the night sky, he began wondering whether space went on forever.

 

Most of us made some version of these discoveries, too, and then got on with things. We learned that numbers never end. We acquired words such as infinity and eternity, became comfortable using them and seldom stopped to consider what they claim. Forever is a perfectly ordinary word for something no one has ever experienced.

 

A Trip to Infinity asks us to stop and consider it.

 

For 79 minutes, mathematicians, physicists, cosmologists and philosophers try to get their minds around something that, by definition, has no end. They draw pictures, tell stories, conduct thought experiments, disagree about whether infinity exists in the physical universe and occasionally frighten themselves. Somehow, the result offers us more thrills than the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa.

 

The film is fascinating, funny, beautiful, at times unnerving and highly recommended for anyone drawn to the questions Spiritual Seniors explores. It can make us feel very small. It can make us reconsider what small means. It can leave us wondering how a finite mind came up with the idea of an infinite universe in the first place. And just when the subject threatens to become too serious, the filmmakers take us to a hotel.

 

In 1924, German mathematician David Hilbert imagined a hotel with infinitely many rooms, every one occupied. A traveler arrives looking for a room. In an ordinary hotel, someone at the front desk recommends the place across the street. Hilbert has a better idea.

 

Guest 1 moves to Room 2, Guest 2 to Room 3, Guest 3 to Room 4, continuing without end. Room 1 is now vacant. The hotel was full; nevertheless, it had room for another guest.

 

Then an infinite number of new guests arrive. The hotel can accommodate them, too.

 

Watch the Infinite Hotel sequence below. It more than earns the eight minutes before going any farther.

 

The Infinite Hotel

 

 

The full documentary is available on Netflix.

 

The hotel is crazy and delightful at the same time, made even more so by the fact that it works mathematically. A hotel with no vacancies has vacancies. Infinity plus one is still infinity. There is no last room, no last guest, no point at which the manager finally hangs out the NO VACANCY sign and goes home.

 

Philosopher Kenny Easwaran asks a question in the film that seems fundamental to the idea itself: Who invented infinity? Do human beings possess some intuitive sense of the infinite, or did we invent the word because we needed a name for something our minds could conceive but never reach?

 

Apparently, no one knows. The idea reaches farther back than anything we can document. Easwaran points to humanity’s earliest evidence of counting. Once someone understood that another number could always be added, there was no obvious place to stop.

 

Numbers are only one place we encountered the problem. We have another word for something no human being has ever reached: eternity.

 

That is an audacious idea for creatures whose experience consists almost entirely of beginnings and endings. Days end. Seasons end. Lives end. Nothing in ordinary human experience lasts forever. Yet across thousands of years, people have contemplated the possibility that something does.

 

Jewish mystics called the boundless divine Ein Sof—“without end.” Christianity conceived of a God without beginning or end and an existence beyond mortal time. Hindu philosophy approached the limitless through Brahman, an ultimate reality beyond the confines of the individual self. Buddhism took another path, contemplating beginningless cycles of existence without an eternal creator God.

 

They are not different religious names for infinity. Their distinctions matter. What is striking is that people separated by centuries, continents and cultures kept reaching beyond the finite world available to them. We learned to count what could be counted and somehow also learned to contemplate what could not.

 

For Alan Lightman, contemplating the vastness beyond us once led somewhere darker.

 

He was about ten when he began looking into the night sky and thinking about his place in it. The universe had existed long before he arrived and would continue long after he was gone. He was a speck. His parents were specks. Everyone he knew was a speck. What difference could any of them possibly make?

 

The question followed him into the ordinary business of being a child. Why bother with school or dentist appointments if, against the scale of the universe, none of it mattered?

 

Then Lightman grew up and fell in love.

 

“And that changed everything,” he says. “That mattered.”

 

Nothing about the universe had changed. Lightman was still a speck. So was the person he loved. What had changed was the proposition he had accepted as a ten-year-old: that our significance must somehow be measured against the size and duration of the universe.

 

Carlo Rovelli, the theoretical physicist, comes at love from another direction. “Love is certainly infinite,” he says, because when we are overwhelmed by it, we experience a sense of breaking limits and boundaries.

 

Mathematically, of course, love is not infinite. Nor is a human life, a relationship, a moment of wonder or anything else we might be tempted to place in Hilbert’s hotel.

 

The film eventually asks us to contemplate the other end of the problem: not what happens when something never ends, but what it means that almost everything else does.

 

The numbers become almost comical. A billion years. A trillion. A hundred trillion. Eventually the stars burn out. Galaxies disappear from view. Black holes themselves evaporate. Stretch the timeline far enough and the period during which stars shone, planets formed and living things could look up at the sky becomes a tiny interruption in an otherwise inconceivable expanse of time.

 

There will be a last living creature, the film tells us. A last conscious being. A last thought.

 

It would be easy to find nihilism here. Physicist Brian Greene finds something else. If nothing is permanent, he argues, perhaps permanence was never the proper measure of value in the first place. For the brief time consciousness exists, there is an opportunity to understand something, to create beauty, to experience wonder.

 

Steven Strogatz follows that thought into territory one might not expect from a mathematician. Our time against infinity is almost nothing, and yet here we are: conscious for a while, capable of knowing something about the universe that produced us and capable of loving within it.

 

“We’re only here for a short time compared to infinity,” Strogatz says, “and, to me, that’s a holy thought.”

 

Then he smiles at where he has arrived. This, he says, is about as close as he gets to being religious.

 

Perhaps holy is exactly the most interesting word here. Strogatz has not discovered evidence of eternity. He has been contemplating the opposite: how little time there may be for any of this.

 

Later life gives that distinction considerably less room to remain theoretical. The infinite may still be impossible to comprehend, but the finite becomes easier. At some point, the fact that a lifetime has limits stops being information and becomes experience. And the question of what matters becomes considerably harder to postpone.

 

Lightman’s ten-year-old self looked at the universe and deduced that a speck could not matter. Then he fell in love. Greene looks toward a future in which almost everything disappears and refuses to conclude that impermanence makes beauty worthless. Strogatz considers our almost absurdly brief appearance against infinity and reaches for the word holy.

 

The film does not settle the question of whether the universe itself is infinite. Near the end, one of its scientists is remarkably comfortable with that.

 

“Not knowing doesn’t make me sad.”

 

There is something appealing about a film on infinity finally arriving at an unanswered question. For all the mathematics, animations, thought experiments and very accommodating hotel managers, infinity remains decidedly beyond our grasp.

 

Perhaps that is where the spiritual life and this mathematical excursion come closest—not in any claim that infinity proves eternity, or that an equation can tell us what happens when we die, but in the experience of standing before something larger than what we can know and resisting the urge to reduce it to an answer.

 

Infinity is not a one-to-one comparison with life. But it asks more of us than it answers. And that may be part of what makes it beautiful.

 

Goldstein has spent her life chasing the peculiar feeling of becoming bigger by understanding how small she is. Gates found it beneath a dining-room table. Lightman found it in the night sky, lost something there for a while, and later found something else in love.

 

A Trip to Infinity never gets us to infinity.

 

But for 79 minutes, it gets us wonderfully lost along the way.

Related spiritual themes: humility, impermanence, Purpose, uncertainty

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