Epilogue

Abstract

We have come to the end of our journey to the infinite. It has carried us from the “horror infiniti” of the Greeks, through the exultation in an infinite universe during the Renaissance, up to the mathematical breakthroughs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which finally demystified infinity and put it on a firm basis. We have also followed man's attempts to reach the infinite physically—from the Tower of Babel to Pioneer 10. And we have seen how artists and poets have depicted the infinite, each in his own way. It is this diversity, I believe, that makes the infinite—or any intellectual venture for that matter—so stimulating. Each of us is entitled to our own infinity.

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

— Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)