41–50 of 97 posts
Clearly everybody missed this little gem which will no doubt be removed: "7 May 2012 at 16:45 - Andy Murdoch creates a post on twitter referencing this page. Universe invites celebration by all."
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Isn't this just a simple matter of probability? Given an event, however unprobable it is, it can happen given infinite time? From a purely mathematical standpoint, this is correct.
If your assumption is infinite time and complete entropy, yes it's correct. It's also why some level of common sense (e.g. Occam's razor) should be applied before such silliness is seriously proposed. I don't think Boltzmann assumes infinite time and entropy, just enough for the completely random emergence of sentient life that thinks (perhaps falsely) that it lives in a universe populated by similar beings who creat…
Occam's razor is more sensible than the absurdity heuristic, but it applies to the fundamental building blocks of a theory, not to the outputs it predicts. So it would cut against a hypothetical unknown set of "balancing forces of entropy and order", since that's an entity not required by our current best known theories.
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I'll see your Ackermann function, and raise you TREE(3). Plus one.
Graham's number anyone?
The maximum length of a sequence of labeled trees, with 3 labels, such that the Nth tree has at most N nodes and no tree can be embedded in any later tree... this being the definition of TREE(3).
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What's really spooky is thinking about the things which we would have been able to observe if we had been around much earlier. Perhaps seeming constants have changed over the history of the universe, or other universes which drifted away from us along now-imperceptible dimensions. (I'm guessing you saw the same Brian Greene TED talk I did.)
Lawrence Krauss's longer talk in Toronto†[1] has a better explanation of the "privileged time" idea (and doesn't invoke string theory except to poke a bit of fun at it). [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdvWrI_oQjY † Krauss has given more-or-less the same talk elsewhere, but the version recorded by TVO (the Ontario provincial public broadcaster) is probably the best recording. [Edit: I misremembered the location of…
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What's more likely: nearly infinite sentient universes complete with false memories of human experiences emerging from entropic chaos, or that we don't quite understand the nature of entropy? The Boltzmann theory is one of those thought experiments that should draw into question it's assumptions out of the pure absurdity of its logical conclusions rather than be taken seriously itself.
Error in Boltzman brains theory is that he assumes that universe with brains randomly fluctuated into existance into its current form , and concludes that this form is more complex than just brain and therefore brains without environments are more common (maybe iPhones or Bible are even more common then), and assumes that brain can exist without environment. also second law of thermodynamics states that resulting ent…
Even more "mind shivering" than this one was a linked article about Boltzman brains ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain ) which I had never heard of before.
I find it interesting how several of the events limit what anyone living then can observe about the past. It's almost as if the past itself is vanishing.
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You might as well say 'One plus the biggest whole number nameable with 1,000 characters of English text', if that sort of thing is allowed.
Are you alluding to Scott Aaronson's essay on Who Can Name the Bigger Number? [1] [1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
Betelgeuse red giant supernova explosion, can it hurt the life on the earth?