Posted on 01/17/2008 8:04:00 AM PST by flevit
This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.
Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agrees this overabundance is absurd, pointed out that some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.” Welcome to what physicists call the Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested the mechanism by which such fluctuations could happen in a gas or in the universe.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My head hurts....
Oh...never mind.
some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.”
Most of those freefloating brains will be voting democrat this year.
when I did a search to see if this has been posted, it seems you posted something fairly similar a while back, thought you might be interested?
He needs to have another toke and restate his thesis.
The universe is a projection of the collective ego. It really is an illusion. Kind of like a hologram or a movie. It doesn’t exist at all. We just perceive it that way.
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My part in the collective ego says what is a collective ego, how can you have an illusion without reality, and how can we percieve something if it doesn’t exist and if we don’t exist? Please don’t answer my rhetorical question!
My cosmotologist also cooks dinners for me. Now she won’t let me be her cosmotologist, even though the financial benefits are self-evident.
Now this is a COOL article.
It’s the sort of thing I hand to scientists around her who irk me for some reason, and makes them make funny noises by the time they go home :) - I love to hear a guy with a Phd who thinks he is better than everyone else blubber like a little kid who’s drooling with new teeth. /chuckle
At some point the question still answered remains, if there is no manufacturing of matter/energy - just a transfer from one to the other, where did the energy/matter come from? The big brain floating in space sounds like an attempt to visualize a god based on pure imagination, I prefer His own revelation.
And they called economics the ‘dismal science.’
We are the manifestation of God’s Mind... could it be that Stars are his Neurons? (He is pure energy you know..)
What’s this? The three bong hit Theory of Everything?
I’m hoping you weren’t being facetious there, because I completely agree with you. I forgot who did it, but I saw a picture, recently, of a computer-generated image of galactic superclusters, zoomed-out... Looked uncannily like a bunch neurons connected with each other. That’s when I had the thought you expressed above.
This is big time brain hurt! Too much for me. Still trying to figure out here if I’m a man who dreamed of being a butterfly, or am a butterfly dreaming myself to be a man. :)
Let’s see, if this article is correct, then I both exist simultaneously in every possible universe, and I randomly pop into random universes, having complete memories of an existence, yet actually being a different “individual” from femtosecond to femtosecond. So, I think it’s about time I popped over to the universe where I’m a billionaire.
Bye!
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