7 ms·

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

37 points by lotusleaf1987 16y ago

ZachPruckowski 16y ago
From the sounds of it, this is a far from accepted idea that's just now coming out in like it's first paper or something, so don't start planning your End of Time Party. There's still a lot of verification and research and math between this being published and it becoming the consensus among physicists.
- robryan 16y ago
  From the comments it sounds like it's related to string theory, which itself is on shaky theoretical ground. Guess we have to think out the box to progress physics, just need these kind of articles to use appropriate language to give a good idea of how far off many of these types of theories are to being proven.
- hugh3 16y ago
  It's not even a paper, it's just a manuscript on the arXiv, yet to pass peer review, if indeed it ever will. I had a quick skim of the manuscript, and remain skeptical... a bunch of it doesn't even seem to make sense: If it does occur in Nature, eternal inflation has profound implications. Any type of event that has nonzero probability will happen infinitely many times, usually in widely separated regions that remain forever outside of causal contact. This undermines the basis for probabilistic predictions of local experiments. If infinitely many observers throughout the universe win the lottery, on what grounds can one still claim that winning the lottery is unlikely? To be sure, there are also infinitely many observers who do not win, but in what sense are there more of them? In local experiments such as playing the lottery, we have clear rules for making predictions and testing theories. But if the universe is eternally inflating, we no longer know why these rules work.
- jbarham 16y ago
  > don't start planning your End of Time Party Rats, there goes my idea for building a Restaurant at the End of the Universe!
Maro 16y ago
Woit's take on the Not Even Wrong blog: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3185 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3185
- hugh3 16y ago
  And linked from that, Lubos Motl's even less charitable take: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/09/bousso-et-al-catastrophe-imminent-time.html 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.
asmithmd1 16y ago
This theory is well across the line from science and into religion. How is this: "we'll run headlong into this catastrophe before we can observe its effects on anything else." any different than this: "But of that day and hour knows no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." http://bible.cc/matthew/24-36.htm http://bible.cc/matthew/24-36.htm
- j_baker 16y ago
  The difference is "Father knows".
zeteo 16y ago
"If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely." That's just plain mathematically wrong. There are many kinds of infinity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number), and the set of all possible events has a much, much higher cardinality than an infinite axis of time. This is similar to saying that, since the set of integers is infinite, it must contain Pi.
- hugh3 16y ago
  the set of all possible events has a much, much higher cardinality than an infinite axis of time. Are you sure of that? How would you prove it? It seems intuitively right, but intuition has a habit of being wrong, when it comes to infinities.
  - jdavid 16y ago
    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 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.
tkeller 16y ago
> If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times. Umm... this does not follow. Their argument surely must be more convincing than this nonsense.
crazyjimbo 16y ago
I've skimmed the paper and it's quite readable. The problem arises because probability doesn't make sense in an infinite universe. To make sense of it the authors consider a small patch of finite size and then let that finite size go arbitrarily large. In this picture probability is well defined but our space and time will always have an edge. However this is just a model, not an expected version of reality. The same thing happens in quantum field theory where the theory doesn't make sense at arbitrarily high energy so we just impose a cut off and ignore energies above a certain scale. This doesn't mean we think physics just stops there. Instead, it's just a way to parameterise our ignorance about what comes beyond.
rick_2047 16y ago
I will leave the validation arguments to the people who know something more than the highschool physics I know. But "End of Time" wtf can that mean? Take a shot sci-fi fans.
frisco 16y ago
Less arXiv on HN, please.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Less of the whole arXiv, or just the subset of the arXiv which is crazy?
  - frisco 16y ago
    The problem is that you need to be a domain expert to tell which parts are crazy. It's not a general consumption resource.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      True. Though the best heuristic that a non-physicist can apply is that if something on the arXiv sounds interesting, it's probably crazy. Non-crazy papers have titles like Universal quantum control of two-electron spin quantum bits using dynamic nuclear polarization and Towards finite density QCD with Taylor expansions and tend to be of interest to around four people in the world, of whom three may or may not be the authors.
      - frisco 16y ago
        Right, and "Eternal Inflation Predicts That Time Will End" totally fails that test. (I don't mean to sound like I'm attacking you -- I agree with you. This is re: the OP)
- scrrr 16y ago
  Is this code for "Less Science Topics" or is there something wrong with arxiv.org?
  - frisco 16y ago
    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.
markkat 16y ago
This is based upon a false assumption. Not every possible thing need happen given infinite time. There's an infinite number of things that can happen, and each thing that happens takes a finite amount of time to happen. Infinite time is not enough for infinite things to happen.
jakerocheleau 16y ago
This doesn't really affect anything here at all. It may be neat that they're predicting time to end over 3 billion years from now, but I can guarantee we'll all be long dead by then.
gwern 16y ago
Well, that makes sense. <i>Time</i>'s circulation has been dropping for years anyway.
paulitex 16y ago
"Earth's lifespan" is slightly misleading if we're talking about inevitable future catastrophes of physics. What's more important is the lifespan of earth as a hospitable planet and that's significantly less time (since the sun is heating up). From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_cycle "...the Sun is gradually becoming more luminous (about 10% every 1 billion years), and its surface temperature is slowly rising. ... The increase in solar temperatures is such that already in about a billion years, the surface of the Earth will become too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life". So (using the numbers from this article) we have about 1 billion years to get off this rock, leaving another 2.7 billion on other planets before time ends. Not a bad run if we can make it. :)
- hugh3 16y ago
  We have about 1 billion years to get off this rock Or we could just move this rock.
zeynel1 16y ago
Time Likely To End Within Earth's Lifespan, Say Astrologers There is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years, according to a new astrological model of the zodiac. Look out into space and the signs are plain to see. According to a certain reading of our tarot cards; Cronos created Heaven and Earth when he sneezed for the first time 13 billion years ago; therefore; Heaven and Earth have been expanding ever since. And the best evidence of the expansion of the Cronos' sneeze comes from observation of the Cronos' germs in distance reaches of the cosmos; therefore; cosmos' expansion is accelerating. That has an important but unavoidable consequence: it means that the cosmos will expand forever. And a cosmos that expands forever is infinite and eternal. This is obviously because the creator of the cosmos the eternal and infinite god Cronos is infinite and eternal. Today, a group of astronologist rebel against this idea. They say an infinitely expanding cosmos cannot be so because the laws of astrology do not work in an infinite cosmos. For these laws to make any sense, the cosmos must end, say the Trimagistus Nuovo Raphaello Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley and few pals. And they have divined when that is most likely to happen. Their divination is deceptively simple and surprisingly powerful. Here's how it goes. If the cosmos lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times. This leads to a problem. When there are an infinite number of instances of every possible divination, it becomes impossible to determine the probabilities of any of these divined events to occur. And when that happens, the laws of astrology simply don't apply; the absurd laws of physics take over. "This is known as the "measure problem" of eternal inflation," say Bousso and buddies. In effect, these guys are saying that the laws of astrology abhor an eternal universe. The only way out of this conundrum is to divine some kind of divine intervention that brings an end to the cosmos. Then all the probabilities make sense again and the laws of astrology regain their power to divine. When might this be? Bousso and co have consulted Cronos' assistant in charge of human affairs, a Mr. Prometheus, and this is the reply they got: "Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50% chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years," said Mr. Prometheus who started it all when he stole the light from Gods to give it to humans and that was about 3.7 billion years ago. So if no symmetry breaking occurs; Bousso and Co's 3.7 billion year prediction for the end of time is as good as proved by Einstein's General Relativity. But Mr. Prometheus had one cautionary statement: "The time will end for humans; not for gods. I am sorry" said Mr. Prometheus, a good friend of humanity since the beginning. 3.7 billion years is not so long! It means that the end of the time is likely to happen within the lifetime of the Gaea and the Hyperion. But Buosso and co have some comforting news too. They don't know what kind of divine intervention will cause the end of time for humanity but they do say that we won't see it coming. They point out that if we were to observe the end of time in any other part of the cosmos where the authority of Cronos has been usurped; we would have to be causally ahead of it, which is unlikely because the God Mnemosyne hates to remember what she had not forgotten. In other words we'll run headlong into this divine intervention before we can observe its effects on anything else. The imminent end of time is a little unsettling but the argument is by no means astronologically sound. Among other things it depends crucially on an important assumption about the laws of astrology: that we ought to be able to understand why they work, not just observe that they do work. And that's a physical point of view rather than an astrological argument. And you cannot trust physicists to explain anything; because for them if it is Wednesday it must be a wave; if it is thursday it must be a particle. So Buosso and buddies raise some interesting questions but nothing to lose any sleep over. At least, not for another 3.7 billion years Cronos will not bother to end time for human beings. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1009.4698: Eternal Inflation Predicts That Time Will End
qntm 16y ago
This can be easily averted. Destroy the Earth.
ellyagg 16y ago
I'm not a physicist and I'm baffled. Doesn't entropy imply that all events cannot happen? Wouldn't an event happening infinite times clearly and unambiguously violate the effects of entropy?
alphaBetaGamma 16y ago
"Any type of event that has nonzero probability will happen infnitely many times(...). This undermines the basis for probabilistic predictions of local experiments. If infnitely many observers throughout the universe win the lottery, on what grounds can one still claim that winning the lottery is unlikely? To be sure, there are also infnitely many observers who do not win, but in what sense are there more of them?" The first sentence is wrong, as pointed out by zeteo, but the rest does not make any sense either. Take continuous random walk starting at zero at t=0. There are an infinite number of paths that reach each value at time t=1. Yet we can say the the probability that the random walk is positive at t=1 is one half. And by "say" I mean give a solid mathematical definition of this fact, not some hand waving argument.

37 points by lotusleaf1987 16y ago

From the sounds of it, this is a far from accepted idea that's just now coming out in like it's first paper or something, so don't start planning your End of Time Party. There's still a lot of verification and research and math between this being published and it becoming the consensus among physicists.

robryan 16y ago
From the comments it sounds like it's related to string theory, which itself is on shaky theoretical ground. Guess we have to think out the box to progress physics, just need these kind of articles to use appropriate language to give a good idea of how far off many of these types of theories are to being proven.
hugh3 16y ago
It's not even a paper, it's just a manuscript on the arXiv, yet to pass peer review, if indeed it ever will. I had a quick skim of the manuscript, and remain skeptical... a bunch of it doesn't even seem to make sense: If it does occur in Nature, eternal inflation has profound implications. Any type of event that has nonzero probability will happen infinitely many times, usually in widely separated regions that remain forever outside of causal contact. This undermines the basis for probabilistic predictions of local experiments. If infinitely many observers throughout the universe win the lottery, on what grounds can one still claim that winning the lottery is unlikely? To be sure, there are also infinitely many observers who do not win, but in what sense are there more of them? In local experiments such as playing the lottery, we have clear rules for making predictions and testing theories. But if the universe is eternally inflating, we no longer know why these rules work.
jbarham 16y ago
> don't start planning your End of Time Party Rats, there goes my idea for building a Restaurant at the End of the Universe!

Maro 16y ago

Woit's take on the Not Even Wrong blog: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3185 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3185

hugh3 16y ago
And linked from that, Lubos Motl's even less charitable take: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/09/bousso-et-al-catastrophe-imminent-time.html 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.

asmithmd1 16y ago

This theory is well across the line from science and into religion. How is this: "we'll run headlong into this catastrophe before we can observe its effects on anything else." any different than this: "But of that day and hour knows no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." http://bible.cc/matthew/24-36.htm http://bible.cc/matthew/24-36.htm

j_baker 16y ago
The difference is "Father knows".

zeteo 16y ago

"If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely." That's just plain mathematically wrong. There are many kinds of infinity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number), and the set of all possible events has a much, much higher cardinality than an infinite axis of time. This is similar to saying that, since the set of integers is infinite, it must contain Pi.

hugh3 16y ago
the set of all possible events has a much, much higher cardinality than an infinite axis of time. Are you sure of that? How would you prove it? It seems intuitively right, but intuition has a habit of being wrong, when it comes to infinities.
- jdavid 16y ago
  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 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.

tkeller 16y ago

> If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times. Umm... this does not follow. Their argument surely must be more convincing than this nonsense.

crazyjimbo 16y ago

I've skimmed the paper and it's quite readable. The problem arises because probability doesn't make sense in an infinite universe. To make sense of it the authors consider a small patch of finite size and then let that finite size go arbitrarily large. In this picture probability is well defined but our space and time will always have an edge. However this is just a model, not an expected version of reality. The same thing happens in quantum field theory where the theory doesn't make sense at arbitrarily high energy so we just impose a cut off and ignore energies above a certain scale. This doesn't mean we think physics just stops there. Instead, it's just a way to parameterise our ignorance about what comes beyond.

rick_2047 16y ago

I will leave the validation arguments to the people who know something more than the highschool physics I know. But "End of Time" wtf can that mean? Take a shot sci-fi fans.

frisco 16y ago

Less arXiv on HN, please.

hugh3 16y ago
Less of the whole arXiv, or just the subset of the arXiv which is crazy?
- frisco 16y ago
  The problem is that you need to be a domain expert to tell which parts are crazy. It's not a general consumption resource.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    True. Though the best heuristic that a non-physicist can apply is that if something on the arXiv sounds interesting, it's probably crazy. Non-crazy papers have titles like Universal quantum control of two-electron spin quantum bits using dynamic nuclear polarization and Towards finite density QCD with Taylor expansions and tend to be of interest to around four people in the world, of whom three may or may not be the authors.
    - frisco 16y ago
      Right, and "Eternal Inflation Predicts That Time Will End" totally fails that test. (I don't mean to sound like I'm attacking you -- I agree with you. This is re: the OP)
scrrr 16y ago
Is this code for "Less Science Topics" or is there something wrong with arxiv.org?
- frisco 16y ago
  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.

markkat 16y ago

This is based upon a false assumption. Not every possible thing need happen given infinite time. There's an infinite number of things that can happen, and each thing that happens takes a finite amount of time to happen. Infinite time is not enough for infinite things to happen.

jakerocheleau 16y ago

This doesn't really affect anything here at all. It may be neat that they're predicting time to end over 3 billion years from now, but I can guarantee we'll all be long dead by then.

gwern 16y ago

Well, that makes sense. <i>Time</i>'s circulation has been dropping for years anyway.

paulitex 16y ago

"Earth's lifespan" is slightly misleading if we're talking about inevitable future catastrophes of physics. What's more important is the lifespan of earth as a hospitable planet and that's significantly less time (since the sun is heating up). From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_cycle "...the Sun is gradually becoming more luminous (about 10% every 1 billion years), and its surface temperature is slowly rising. ... The increase in solar temperatures is such that already in about a billion years, the surface of the Earth will become too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life". So (using the numbers from this article) we have about 1 billion years to get off this rock, leaving another 2.7 billion on other planets before time ends. Not a bad run if we can make it. :)

hugh3 16y ago
We have about 1 billion years to get off this rock Or we could just move this rock.

zeynel1 16y ago

Time Likely To End Within Earth's Lifespan, Say Astrologers There is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years, according to a new astrological model of the zodiac. Look out into space and the signs are plain to see. According to a certain reading of our tarot cards; Cronos created Heaven and Earth when he sneezed for the first time 13 billion years ago; therefore; Heaven and Earth have been expanding ever since. And the best evidence of the expansion of the Cronos' sneeze comes from observation of the Cronos' germs in distance reaches of the cosmos; therefore; cosmos' expansion is accelerating. That has an important but unavoidable consequence: it means that the cosmos will expand forever. And a cosmos that expands forever is infinite and eternal. This is obviously because the creator of the cosmos the eternal and infinite god Cronos is infinite and eternal. Today, a group of astronologist rebel against this idea. They say an infinitely expanding cosmos cannot be so because the laws of astrology do not work in an infinite cosmos. For these laws to make any sense, the cosmos must end, say the Trimagistus Nuovo Raphaello Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley and few pals. And they have divined when that is most likely to happen. Their divination is deceptively simple and surprisingly powerful. Here's how it goes. If the cosmos lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times. This leads to a problem. When there are an infinite number of instances of every possible divination, it becomes impossible to determine the probabilities of any of these divined events to occur. And when that happens, the laws of astrology simply don't apply; the absurd laws of physics take over. "This is known as the "measure problem" of eternal inflation," say Bousso and buddies. In effect, these guys are saying that the laws of astrology abhor an eternal universe. The only way out of this conundrum is to divine some kind of divine intervention that brings an end to the cosmos. Then all the probabilities make sense again and the laws of astrology regain their power to divine. When might this be? Bousso and co have consulted Cronos' assistant in charge of human affairs, a Mr. Prometheus, and this is the reply they got: "Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50% chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years," said Mr. Prometheus who started it all when he stole the light from Gods to give it to humans and that was about 3.7 billion years ago. So if no symmetry breaking occurs; Bousso and Co's 3.7 billion year prediction for the end of time is as good as proved by Einstein's General Relativity. But Mr. Prometheus had one cautionary statement: "The time will end for humans; not for gods. I am sorry" said Mr. Prometheus, a good friend of humanity since the beginning. 3.7 billion years is not so long! It means that the end of the time is likely to happen within the lifetime of the Gaea and the Hyperion. But Buosso and co have some comforting news too. They don't know what kind of divine intervention will cause the end of time for humanity but they do say that we won't see it coming. They point out that if we were to observe the end of time in any other part of the cosmos where the authority of Cronos has been usurped; we would have to be causally ahead of it, which is unlikely because the God Mnemosyne hates to remember what she had not forgotten. In other words we'll run headlong into this divine intervention before we can observe its effects on anything else. The imminent end of time is a little unsettling but the argument is by no means astronologically sound. Among other things it depends crucially on an important assumption about the laws of astrology: that we ought to be able to understand why they work, not just observe that they do work. And that's a physical point of view rather than an astrological argument. And you cannot trust physicists to explain anything; because for them if it is Wednesday it must be a wave; if it is thursday it must be a particle. So Buosso and buddies raise some interesting questions but nothing to lose any sleep over. At least, not for another 3.7 billion years Cronos will not bother to end time for human beings. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1009.4698: Eternal Inflation Predicts That Time Will End

qntm 16y ago

This can be easily averted. Destroy the Earth.

ellyagg 16y ago

I'm not a physicist and I'm baffled. Doesn't entropy imply that all events cannot happen? Wouldn't an event happening infinite times clearly and unambiguously violate the effects of entropy?

alphaBetaGamma 16y ago

"Any type of event that has nonzero probability will happen infnitely many times(...). This undermines the basis for probabilistic predictions of local experiments. If infnitely many observers throughout the universe win the lottery, on what grounds can one still claim that winning the lottery is unlikely? To be sure, there are also infnitely many observers who do not win, but in what sense are there more of them?" The first sentence is wrong, as pointed out by zeteo, but the rest does not make any sense either. Take continuous random walk starting at zero at t=0. There are an infinite number of paths that reach each value at time t=1. Yet we can say the the probability that the random walk is positive at t=1 is one half. And by "say" I mean give a solid mathematical definition of this fact, not some hand waving argument.