Time Likely To End Within Earth's Lifespan, Say Physicists

And linked from that, Lubos Motl's even less charitable take:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/09/bousso-et-al-catastrophe-i...

Much like most other doomsday prophets and other kinds of crackpots, the authors are completely unable to understand the point and the arguments that they're assuming something fundamentally wrong in their very first axioms - and that's why everything they write down has to end up being a complete nonsense.

Instead, they obviously expect a long sequence of follow-up papers that will discuss whether the Universe will cease to exist in 5.31 or 5.32 billion years and worship the amazing prophets, Bousso et al., who have predicted this amazing doomsday. This is also clear from a staged dialogue included in the paper where a semi-dumb person asks various questions about the doomsday that the authors would clearly like to be discussed in other people's papers.

if they universe is composed of a single axis by which information is sorted, then infinite time should produce all possible combinations. However, if the universe has some 'structure' to it, it might become ordered at some point, exchanging chaos for order. In a universe that becomes ever more ordered and unique. This isn't like saying infinity - infinity, or infinity/infinity, this is more like there are a set of the infinite, and there is a set of the finite, and they are two distinct sets without one influencing the other.

Order and Chaos need not be interchangeable.

There is an interesting book called "Sync" which discusses the presence of spontaneous order from chaos. He also talks about how order can turn back into chaos, but the important part of the book is that there are cases where chaos will not turn into order, and order will not turn into chaos, meaning that the stability of the two create two distinct sets, one that contains the identity of the universe and one that allows it to change.

Some of you may have read Wolframs work as well which shows that simple rules can lead to ordered stable systems. That stability is the definition of uniqueness.

Sync, it's the one book I recommend all my thinking friends read. http://amzn.to/a8s5Dl

It changed my life, and my world view.

So, I am comfortable saying that no act of randomness by any number of chimpanzees ( as they are now ) will randomly produce a work of William Shakespeare. WS, wasn't just a man, he was a man in a time with billions of events that influenced that moment when he composed those works. There was a structure and a path to those influences, and it wasn't such a frail construct that randomness happened upon it, but rather there was a beautify symmetry that occurred and allowed that to come to pass.

Another way to look at it, is that random/ chaotic signals will not sum up to collapse a bridge. however an ordered marching army has in many cased taken down the bridge.

No, there is no largest integer with a finite number of digits.

There are infinitely many integers, but every integer is finite.

arxiv is a preprint database that anyone can submit to. It's the 4chan of scientific papers. Experts in the field often have a hard time making sense of what's going on there. Granted, there is good stuff -- but only if you already know exactly what you're looking at. ArXiv is not a place for the general public. Wait until the papers clear peer-review for that.

> Well, there IS an integer that contains all the digits of Pi

1234567890 does:)