It’s an idea straight out of the schoolyard: that you might one day accidentally count so high that you break the laws of math. A new preprint (that has not yet been peer-reviewed) seems to have done just that, however – and it could have huge ramifications for how we ought to understand infinity. It’s fitting that such a baffling result would have come from set theory: it’s an area with a reputation for being abstract and often counter-intuitive; it has its own esoteric alphabet and language; and it’s famous for results that seem either too basic to have even...