[Infinite Physics]

My high school physics class. This was, you might remember, a time when students still used slide rules, a time before the invention of pocket electronic calculators. But the physics classroom came equipped with an ancient, even then, electric powered mechanical calculating engine which sat humming, a cash register-sized gun-metal metal hulk, in its corner. Our teacher had placed a single prohibition on its use. We were not to ask the machine, under any circumstances, to calculate the product where any number is the dividend and zero is the divisor. At the first opportunity after the issuing of the edict, the teacher out of the room, my class immediately posted a lookout and punched up a random number, indicated the task of division, then pressed the forbidden zero key. Instantly the machine's workings, clad in that streamlined dappled cowling, began cogitating as its hundreds of gears searched within themselves for the answer to the number of times zero fits into 212. Try this now on your pocket calculator and the digital read-out pulses and shifts to zero, but the construction of the mechanical calculator drove it to represent a more accurate calculation. With each stutter of the machine, its innards shot out slugs of printing columns to imprint, on the ever-lengthening tape, another blue number. Then it wound up again, lurched on the tabletop, ejecting another number. How about this, how about this. We noticed the building heat given off as the gears ground. We were frightened by the animated skips the machine made, skidding with each gnashing calculation. The machine was looking for infinity, of course, and was ill-equipped to represent it. Instead it was driven by its archaic design to offer every number it could muster in an infinite amount of time, which it believed it now had.