Bored from a day of taking on a dense Establishment, The Slogger decides to have a crack at the logic of physics.

A sleepless night may lie ahead for those who read this. Reverse psychology has always maintained that such an opening statement will guarantee everyone reading this short piece right to the end. I hope so: after a hard day, I’m damned if I should be the only one lying awake in the wee small hours.

See if you can give me an answer to this one. (And the request is genuine, not smart-arsed – I genuinely don’t know the solution to this conundrum).

The Universe, physicists tell us, is infinite. This means that there must be an infinite number of stars in it. But as the stars are smaller than the Universal space itself, how can both things be of equal infinity?

The answer is that density is different to volume. The same principle applies to the planets -they are tiny compared to stars, but in the vast majority of cases they’re much more dense. Ergo, the same infinity of volume applies.

But this neat Newtonian ruling breaks down if we just talk about infinity in terms of numbers.

Ten is a number. If I say that in some distant part of the Universe there are ten planets and ten stars in a given area, then they are of an equal numerical value.

Infinity isn’t a number, but it must have a value. That value is infinity. But just looking at our own nebula, it is blindingly obvious that there are far, far more stars than there are planets. The astronomical and mass/light observations of the last two decades tell us this conclusively: some stars have planets belting round them, but many don’t.

Now if the Universe is of infinite size, there must (any self-respecting logician would agree) be an infinite number of stars and planets. But we have already established that that there are more stars than planets.

So if infinity were a constant, it follows that there must be places in the Universe where – to make up for all those whopping great spaces in our bit of it with no planets in – there must be places where the planets are like frog-spawn, with no stars for them to circle.

I venture to suggest that, however eccentric the Creator may be, this is unlikely.

Therefore, infinity is almost certainly not a constant. QED.

Does this mean anything relevant to the price of beans? Perhaps not – but it might. For instance, if infinity isn’t a constant, it means that this whole physical construct we inhabit is, to be frank, something of a fraud.

Just before he died, Einstein said that trying to work the whole Universe thing out was “like playing chess against a Grand Master who cheats”. This has long been my view: I think something (and most definitely, not a Deity of any kind) is taking the piss.

Hence my casual attachment to Buddhism. It is the one religion with no Deity and thus, the only one without huge numbers of mass murders and horrific wars to its name. Buddhists aver,quite simply, “Everything is an illusion”. I can get behind that.