Let's imagine something that ends, something that one day finishes, something with a definitive, objective, not subjective end. We never stop to think about whether things ever end, but I can say with certainty that they never end, nothing ends, everything is infinite. Many will say that death is something that ends, but it isn't. From an atheistic view, death is simply a transformation of matter, because as you well know: Matter is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. Religiously speaking, the soul goes elsewhere, to heaven, and our body remains matter that only transforms.
It's very hard to think of something that ends, because in reality there isn't anything that ends. It's as if we tried to imagine a color that doesn't exist, how can we imagine a color that doesn't exist? Our brain can only think and combine things we've already lived. In fact, dreams are just combinations of events stored in our memory that come together all at once, but never things we haven't seen.
The Small Is an Infinite
Many will say that school is something that ends, but those are subjective things. Music also ends, but if we think more deeply about what music is… music is waves, vibrations of atoms, simply vibrating strongly toward us. Then, that vibration dissipates, its energy transfers to the medium, becomes heat, the thermal motion of molecules. The coherent wave we perceived as sound stops existing as such, but the energy that composed it doesn't disappear, it redistributes into the environment. Did it really stop existing, or did it simply transform into something we can no longer perceive? The energy is still there, it just changed form.
If we split an atom, we'll find the nucleus surrounded by electrons; if we split a proton we find quarks. If we try to split a quark… well, current physics tells us that quarks aren't "tiny balls" containing something inside. They are excitations of quantum fields, perturbations in a field that exists throughout all space. Asking "what's inside a quark?" might be like asking "what's north of the North Pole?", the question itself might not make sense within that framework. But this doesn't close the door: the Planck scale (~10⁻³⁵ meters) marks the limit of what current physics can describe. Beyond that, we don't know if space itself has structure, if there's anything smaller, or if the concept of "size" stops applying. The philosophical question remains open: is there a fundamental limit, or is there always something further?
The Large Is an Infinite
The Universe is always expanding, meaning it never ends. If we tried to reach the end, there would always be more. So we will never run into a wall, just as in the very small. So far the human race only knows the observable universe, which contains billions of galaxies (ours, the Milky Way), but we cannot say with certainty that those are the only galaxies that exist, because we can only see as far as light has had time to travel since the Big Bang. So, why, if there's an infinite in the large, wouldn't there be an infinite in the small? It would have to be logical, no?
Infinity in mathematics has always been controversial. Since it could never quite be "deciphered," it was always seen as the behavior at infinity, as a number grows, how it behaves. In fact, there are mathematicians who prefer to work without infinity because it's something not yet fully understood. To study it, we mathematicians have to analyze its behavior, not its exact value, and that makes everything different at infinity. Just as classical physics changes inside quantum physics, the smaller you go, the rules of classical physics change, why wouldn't the rules of mathematics change as you go larger?
The Beginning That Doesn't Exist
So, if there is nothing that ends, how was there a beginning? Because for heat to exist, its absence must exist, the cold; for light to exist, darkness must exist; for the good to exist, the bad must exist; for a beginning to exist, an end must exist. But if we can't explain an end, how can we explain a beginning?
Imagine an infinite straight line, where would you put its beginning? You can't see it, because our brain, unconsciously, when we try to imagine an infinite line, can't imagine an infinity with an end, because that's something that doesn't exist (like the color that doesn't exist); but our brain also can't imagine a beginning, because that's something that doesn't exist, if something infinite exists.
On Chaos and Order
It seems illogical to me to think that the universe was created by the Big Bang as a chaotic explosion that made everything. The Big Bang, as modern cosmology describes it, was not an explosion in space but an expansion of space itself from an extremely dense and hot state.
What there was "before," or whether "before" even makes sense when time itself originates there, is a genuinely open question in physics.
But I can argue that chaos, as we colloquially understand it, doesn't exist. And science backs me up on this, though in an unexpected way: what we call "chaos" in physics and mathematics is completely deterministic. Chaos is a system where the rules are perfectly defined, but the results are practically impossible to predict because microscopic differences in initial conditions produce radically different outcomes.
Let's see it this way: if we throw some marbles into a bowl, and we throw them all the same way, with the same gravity, each one will land at a point on the bowl's curve, which will cause it to bounce off toward some other point. If we could pause the marbles bouncing, we could calculate with physics where each one will land. Clearly, when there are 20 marbles bouncing and we can't pause them, this looks like a chaos of bouncing marbles. But how is something whose behavior we can describe mathematically considered chaos?
This is exactly what the three-body problem shows: with just three celestial bodies under mutual gravitational attraction, predicting their long-term trajectories becomes practically impossible, but never theoretically impossible. The equations exist; what fails is our capacity to compute them with sufficient precision. So we can infer that chaos is not the absence of order, but order too complex for us to compute. Everything is always in order, the Earth and its systems were in equilibrium, until we humans came along and began to alter that order.
The Gift
If we ask a child what they want most in this world, a child who hasn't lived long enough to know what they want to dedicate themselves to, what they like and what they don't, they'll ask for something infinite: their mom forever, an infinite ice cream, candy that never runs out. They don't think it. They feel it.
And if we ask an adult what they desire most, the answer, deep down, is the same. We always wish that something wouldn't end. That's why nostalgia hits us when we close chapters: because if it were up to us, we'd live one more moment, or thousands more moments, in that same place.
The gift of this universe is that it's infinite. It is, literally, the best gift that exists: everything, without an end. The gift isn't somewhere else. The gift isn't luck. The gift is this. And the purpose of human beings is to create, create, create. It's the only thing that truly distinguishes us from everything else in the universe: we can create, and I don't mean having children. I mean to build, to imagine, to make exist something that didn't exist before. What better gift than a field that, the more you explore it, the more properties it reveals. New technology, new theories, new questions. We never finish, because to finish you'd need an end, and that end doesn't exist.
Ask an Olympic medalist what they enjoyed most: the medal or the process? Humans live for the process. Where we are happy is not at the goal, but on the path toward it.