Infinity in the Kitchen

Mrowwww, Hissss, Thump.
The two cats streaked out of the kitchen into the living room.

“Yeah, I’m looking forward to beginning the math class like a root canal,” sighed Jane. “I’m trying to forget it completely. I promised Dick a batch of cookies.”

Jane turned to the kitchen. It was the sack of flour that had thumped to the floor. “Gotta go, Alice. My turn to drive. Pick ya up at 7:00. Bye.”

Flour all over the floor. Jane grabbed the cats, stuffing each into his crate. They immediately stretched their paws through the bars toward each other. Jane nudged Eppie’s crate away from Delta’s. There! They couldn’t play pattycake with each other.

“Now look what you’ve done, you two!” Jane put the sack back into the pantry, surveying the mess. “Maybe I can sweep this up and still have time to bake.” She retrieved the whisk broom and dustpan. Jane whisked as much of the flour into the dustpan, leaving streaks of flour behind, no matter how much she swept. Those two had managed to dump the sack so there was still more flour in the space between the cabinet and the refrigerator.

“You two dumb twits!” She started the vacuum cleaner, sucking up the rest of the flour. No. There was still flour out of reach beside the fridge. Jane changed to the crevice tool, sucking up still more of the flour. But still some was out of reach.

The front door slammed. “Yo, Sis, I don’t smell my cookies.”

“Yo, yourself. And there’s nothing to smell! Your stupid cats,” she said. “Help me move this fridge.”

Dick sighed, shifting the refrigerator out. “Playful kitties, aren’t they?” he said, glancing at the crates. Jane turned the vacuum back on, cleaning up the last of the flour. Dick pushed the refrigerator back into place.

“As if I didn’t have the heebie jeebies about class tonight. I have to give four examples of infinity. What do I know about infinity? You said you’d help me.”

“The cats have done all your work for you!”

“Huh?”

“Well, look at the crates. See, they can’t reach each other. Those crates could be a foot apart, a mile apart, half-way around the world. It doesn’t matter. They can’t touch each other; so they’re infinitely far apart for the cats.”

“Noooo, infinity is about stars and planets and stuff.”

“Well, Jane, some people like to make it seem hard to understand. The word gets tossed around a lot to mean different things to different people. Let’s leave religion infinity and space infinity out of the discussion, ok? You might think of math infinity as just a split hair larger than ‘enough,’ like moving the cages apart just enough that they couldn’t reach each other. On the other hand, you might think of math infinity as just a split hair smaller than ‘not enough.
“See, some things can be infinitely large. Some things can be infinitely small.
“Now, consider the mess they made. Your work with the broom didn’t clean it all up, did it, Jane?”

“No. It still left streaks of flour.”

“Looking at it from the straw’s perspective, the flour particles are infinitely small, so small that the broom can’t even see a single tiny flour particle. The tiny flour particles slipped between the gigantic broom straws. Looking at it from the flour particle’s perspective, the broom straws are infinitely large. Put a gigantic straw over a flour particle and the particle can’t see anything! The flour particles were infinitely smaller than the infinitely larger broom straws. That’s why it didn’t work.”

“Oh! That’s why I could get the last of the flour. The crevice tool was infinitely shorter than the distance to the flour! Then we changed the rules by moving the fridge so that the distance was no longer infinitely farther than I could reach!”

“Jane, you’re becoming an infinity expert!”