So I'm on my way to the men's room at work, pondering the infinite (as usual), and I've got these two simple images in my mind: a simple line circle and the immediately visible portion of an infinitely long straight line. Just two black lines next to each other on a white piece of paper: one circular, the other straight. And I think, "They're both infinitely long, in one way or another, since neither has an end." Then I think of a graph of that logarithmic approach to infinity, or to light speed, the curve getting ever closer to the limit line but never quite reaching, and never quite flattening out. I see the curve of the circle next to the straight line appear to become flatter and flatter as the circle gets bigger and bigger around, but the circle's line never really becomes flat because, of course, it's still got to have a curve if it's a circle. And then I think of the circle pivoting away from me, as if hung by a single hinge at the point closest to the infinitely long straight line, so that the circle swings downward into the piece of paper until I'm looking at the circle edge-on. And it's a perfectly straight line.
And I'm thinking, two things that appear to be fundamentally dissimilar from one perspective can appear to be essentially identical from another. And is that a way to make the conceptual leap from the finite to the infinite, or from sub-light-speed matter to light-speed energy? Is it just a matter of looking at things differently, and that's the way they are, like in Madelein's L'Engle's books?
Is perfect understanding always there, everywhere, waiting for us to see it as it truly is?
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