>>14293519Drop your childlike conception of reality as comparable to "math with apples". The fact is: we have no basis to suspect reality can be limited, in any area. It is suspected that the universe we inhabit is infinite -- countable infinity is the plain, base canvas of reality, rather than your "apples" view that reality, i.e. the totality of existence, is some individual "thing" suspended in a void of nothingness (a paradox, since nothingness of course does not exist outside fiction/human language), with the "something" encroaching on the nothingness by expanding.
The "apples view" may be an appropriate view maybe for a primate picking berries
Now you might ask, how then is this infinity "divided in slices", like sausage, so we can have operations on certain sub-areas of it, i.e. produce "meaning" from a physics perspective? It's definitely not done via individual "red apple" structures (almost by implication, anything that spans the entire domain of reality (so we have identical laws of nature at every spot) must also have an infinite measure in some sense), because it's logically a much bolder claim to hold something to be singular, rather than simply being a multiple that is the result of some projection from some known or unknown domain.
The answer is: such sausage-slicing happens via finite fields. In brief, these are modulo arithmetic algebras that convert infinities into limited sets.
As we don't have reason to suspect the singularity at the start of the big bang was in some privileged position, and having above established that the fundamental canvas of reality is one of infinity rather than an avaricious and arbitrary, even "gnostic" and almost deity-like "randomly in a very limited fashion willing into existence" of universe-like entities, we may posit that our universe sprang from some part of the cosmos that produces such universes -- i.e. eternal inflation.
