In tune with the infinite?

Being a Poem in the Making (Part #9)

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Without the query, this is the title of a well-known book by Ralph Waldo Trine (In Tune with the Infinite: fullness of peace, power and plenty, 1897). The title helpfully relates the impersonal preoccupation of physicists with a sense of the personal resonances valued in the experience of poetry.

Whether understood in terms of a universe or a multiverse, any engagement with the "infinite" is clearly a challenge -- to which physics has responded with enthusiasm. The explanatory products of their efforts, as argued above, pose a particular challenge of comprehensibility and meaningfulness for those lacking the skills of physicists. As noted, the nature of this challenge invites a degree of playful inploration.

In their efforts to explain the "infinite", physicists are very free with assertive "definitions", despite the lessons of history of ideas. These definitions may be understood as a currently fashionable means of reducing the infinite to forms comprehensible within the currently preferred language of physics -- a process of "de-fining". For those of poetic inspiration this may be regretted as a reduction in precisely that variety to which people may variously respond and by which they may be variously inspired -- perhaps to be understood as the removal of that which is experientially "fine". There is some irony to this in that it is physics which has defined a fine-structure constant -- a fundamental dimensionless coupling constant characterizing the strength of electromagnetic interaction.

This process of progressive definition towards a Theory of Everything -- whereby everything is being effectively defined -- suggests a cognitive variant of the problematic "enclosure of the commons". Personal experience is thereby "confined" within a set of "definitions". As implied by the property analogue, such enclosure is reinforced by legally binding restrictions, notably evident as constraints on innovative design (cf. Considerable Conglomeration of "Cons" of Global Concern, 2012). Other implications are evident in the process of "development" within those constraints, itself inviting challenge (cf. Veloping: the Art of Sustaining Significance, 1997).

Whilst "infinite" is notably suggestive of unending boundlessness in space, the very notion of "boundary" -- as with the "commons" -- is readily challenged. Thus for mathematics the simple sphere is "finite but unbounded". More complex forms may require quite challenging understandings of boundary -- as with the paradoxical Klein bottle, mentioned above. The shape of the universe is a matter of continuing debate within astrophysics. Such preoccupations invite reflection on how an individual (or group) might understand their own personal cognitive "universe" to be shaped and bounded -- within the limits of their comprehension. How might an individual or group be "finite but unbounded"?

A second connotation is associated with "infinite", namely the sense of an "end" in time. Again astrophysics is as preoccupied with the "end of the universe" as with its beginning. Religions have long been preoccupied with "end times". Missing, as discussed below, is whether the insights of physics regarding the infinite have anything meaningful to contribute to any sense of "ending", whether of a civilization, a group, or an individual. Do the sophisticated reflections regarding the shape of the universe, and on the nature of its ending, offer patterns to which people can relate in considering the end of the "universes" in which they are variously involved?

Challenging associations of "in-finity" (In fine)
	Science (Physics)	Aesthetics (Poetics)
Fine (fine, prefine, superfine)	quantitative detail	qualitative pattern
De-fine (define, misdefine, predefine, redefine, undefine)	precision within context / reduction of variability	degradation of quality / reduction of variety (?)
Con-fine (confine)	restriction to (explicit) quantitative limits	restriction to (implicit) qualitative limits (?)
Affine (affine, co-affine)	association of finite values with comparable finite quantities, typically linear (formal similarity)	qualitative affinity (kindred, connected, correspondence)
Re-fine (refine, overrefine)	increase in quantitative approximation	increase in qualitative approximation

Do these various associations "converge" in some way "at infinity" -- at an "end" where "everything" is "fine", namely an elusive "heavenly" culmination? Does the articulation of such a possibility itself have problematic implications? (cf. Paradoxes of Engaging with the Ultimate in any Guise: Living Life Penultimately, 2012). Does such a convergence call for forms of cognitive "resonance" consistent with the sense of being "in tune" with the infinite in some way? Given the play on "explanation" and "inplanation" above (and the absence of consideration of "exfinity" by physics), there would appear to be a case for recognizing that "infinity" has "internal" implications as much as being "externally" explicit.

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