Is infinity + 1 > infinity?

Light display image of the mathematical symbol for infinity to illustrate a post about inifinity

Photo by Freddie Marriage on Unsplash

What about infinity plus a million? You guessed it:  they are equal. Infinity + 1 = infinity plus a million = infinity! This does seem counter intuitive until you recognise that you are only lured into thinking that infinity plus something is bigger than infinity because you are unconsciously treating infinity as a number, which it is not. Infinity is an expression used to describe a concept of something that has no bound. This is not something that we are used to handling within our highly bounded 3 dimensional physical  world! 

Indeed “infinity plus one” is virtually the same as saying “imagination plus one” and only appears to make slightly more sense because we know that the number line is also unbounded and we are usually first exposed to infinity in that mathematical context, which understandably establishes a connection between the two in our minds. Notwithstanding, the connection is certainly not that they are both numbers!