Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. There’s a famous way to seemingly create chocolate out of nothing. Maybe you’ve seen it before. This chocolate bar is 4 squares by 8 squares, but if you cut it like this and then like this and finally like this you can rearrange the pieces like so and wind up with the same 4 by 8 bar but with a leftover piece, apparently created out of thin air. There’s a popular animation of this illusion as well. I call it an illusion because it’s just that. Fake. In reality, the final bar is a bit smaller. It contains this much less chocolate. Each square along the cut is shorter than it was in the original, but the cut makes it difficult to notice right away. The animation is extra misleading, because it tries to cover up its deception. The lost height of each square is surreptitiously added in while the piece moves to make it hard to notice. I mean, come on, obviously you cannot cut up a chocolate bar and rearrange the pieces into more than you started with. Or can you?  One of the strangest theorems in modern mathematics is the Banach-Tarski paradox. It proves that there is, in fact, a way to take an object and separate it into 5 different pieces. And then, with those five pieces, simply rearrange them. No stretching required into two exact copies of the original item. Same density, same size, same everything. Seriously. To dive into the mind blow that it is and the way it fundamentally questions math and ourselves, we have to start by asking a few questions.  First, what is infinity? A number? I mean, it’s nowhere on the number line, but we often say things like there’s an infinite “number” of blah-blah-blah. And as far as we know, infinity could be real. The universe may be infinite in size and flat, extending out for ever and ever without end, beyond even the part we can observe or ever hope to observe. That’s exactly what infinity is. Not a number per se, but rather a size. The size of something that doesn’t end. Infinity is not the biggest number, instead, it is how many numbers there are. But there are different sizes of infinity. The smallest type of infinity is countable infinity. The number of hours in forever. It’s also the number of whole numbers that there are, natural number, the numbers we use when counting things, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. Sets like these are unending, but they are countable.  Countable means that you can count them from one element to any other in a finite amount of time, even if that finite amount of time is longer than you will live or the universe will exist for, it’s still finite.  Uncountable infinity, on the other hand, is literally bigger. Too big to even count. The number of real numbers that there are, not just whole numbers, but all numbers is uncountably infinite. You literally cannot count even from 0 to 1 in a finite amount of time by naming every real number in between. I mean, where do you even start? Zero, okay. But what comes next? 0.000000… Eventually, we would imagine a 1 going somewhere at the end, but there is no end. We could always add another 0. Uncountability makes this set so much larger than the set of all whole numbers that even between 0 and 1, there are more numbers than there are whole numbers on the entire endless number line.  Georg Cantor’s famous diagonal argument helps illustrate this. Imagine listing every number between zero and one. Since they are uncountable and can’t be listed in order, let’s imagine randomly generating them forever with no repeats. Each number regenerate can be paired with a whole number. If there’s a one to one correspondence between the two, that is if we can match one whole number to each real number on our list, that would mean that countable and uncountable sets are the same size. But we can’t do that, even though this list goes on forever. Forever isn’t enough. Watch this.  If we go diagonally down our endless list of real numbers and take the first decimal of the first number and the second of the second number, the third of the third and so on and add one to each, subtracting one if it happens to be a nine, we can generate a new real number that is obviously between 0 and 1, but since we’ve defined it to be different from every number on our endless list and at least one place it’s clearly not contained in the list. In other words, we’ve used up every single whole number, the entire infinity of them and yet we can still come up with more real numbers. Here’s something else that is true but counter-intuitive. There are the same number of even numbers as there are even and odd numbers. At first, that sounds ridiculous. Clearly, there are only half as many even numbers as all whole numbers, but that intuition is wrong. The set of all whole numbers is denser but every even number can be matched with a whole number. You will never run out of members either set, so this one to one correspondence shows that both sets are the same size. In other words, infinity divided by two is still infinity. Infinity plus one is also infinity.  A good illustration of this is Hilbert’s paradox up the Grand Hotel. Imagine a hotel with a countably infinite number of rooms. But now, imagine that there is a person booked into every single room. Seemingly, it’s fully booked, right? No. Infinite sets go against common sense. You see, if a new guest shows up and wants a room, all the hotel has to do is move the guest in room number 1 to room number 2. And a guest in room 2 to room 3 and 3 to 4 and 4 to 5 and so on. Because the number of rooms is never ending we cannot run out of rooms. Infinity -1 is also infinity again. If one guest leaves the hotel, we can shift every guest the other way. Guest 2 goes to room 1, 3 to 2, 4 to 3 and so on, because we have an infinite amount of guests. That is a never ending supply of them. No room will be left empty. As it turns out, you can subtract any finite number from infinity and still be left with infinity. It doesn’t care. It’s unending.  Banach-Tarski hasn’t left our sights yet. All of this is related. We are now ready to move on to shapes.  Hilbert’s hotel can be applied to a circle. Points around the circumference can be thought of as guests. If we remove one point from the circle that point is gone, right? Infinity tells us it doesn’t matter. The circumference of a circle is irrational. It’s the radius times 2Pi. So, if we mark off points beginning from the whole, every radius length along the circumference going clockwise we will never land on the same point twice, ever. We can count off each point we mark with a whole number. So this set is never-ending, but countable, just like guests and rooms in Hilbert’s hotel. And like those guests, even though one has checked out, we can just shift the rest. Move them counterclockwise and every room will be filled Point 1 moves to fill in the hole, point 2 fills in the place where point 1 used to be, 3 fills in 2 and so on. Since we have a unending supply of numbered points, no hole will be left unfilled. The missing point is forgotten. We apparently never needed it to be complete.  There’s one last needo consequence of infinity we should discuss before tackling Banach-Tarski. Ian Stewart famously proposed a brilliant dictionary. One that he called the Hyperwebster. The Hyperwebster lists every single possible word of any length formed from the 26 letters in the English alphabet. It begins with “a,” followed by “aa,” then “aaa,” then “aaaa.” And after an infinite number of those, “ab,” then “aba,” then “abaa”, “abaaa,” and so on until “z, “za,” “zaa,” et cetera, et cetera, until the final entry in infinite sequence of “z”s. Such a dictionary would contain every single word. Every single thought, definition, description, truth, lie, name, story. What happened to Amelia Earhart would be in that dictionary, as well as every single thing that didn’t happened to Amelia Earhart. Everything that could be said using our alphabet. Obviously, it would be huge, but the company publishing it might realize that they could take a shortcut. If they put all the words that begin with a in a volume titled “A,” they