4 ms·

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 Ti

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!

4 ms·

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 Ti

by ZachPruckowski 16y ago

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!