Afterword: On Infinity
(EN: The afterword here seems to have little to do with the topic of the book, but explores the concept of what is meant by "infinite" - which sounds like a gross overstatement, but turns out to be not so farfetched.)
Consider the relatively simple case of standard eight-stud LEGO bricks (two rows of four studs):
- Using just six bricks, there are over 915 million possible combinations.
- The number of combinations possible with 25 such bricks is considered infinite - it hasn't been calculated, but is expected that it would take 313 duodecillion years to calculate the number.
- Neither of these accounts for the color of the bricks, just interlocking shapes
- This is just using a single brick, and Lego manufactures 3,900 different elements (bricks of various sizes, wheels, figures, etc.)
Technically, you could argue that there is a mathematically finite number of combinations that could be built with LEGO bricks, but the number of possibilities is so incredibly huge that it is well beyond human comprehension.
Given that such a thing can be rightly said of something a simple as a child's toy, it can likely be said of any combination that can be made of teal elements - and when you include the ability to fabricate additional elements to be added to the mix, whatever is dreamt of to be realized, what you arrive at is, for all intents and purposes, truly infinite in all but the strict mathematical sense.