Norman Samish wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Brent Meeker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>>
>
> Brent, you say, ". . . It seems to me that an information theoretic
> analysis should be able to place a lower bound on how small a
> probability can be and not be zero."
>
> Doesn't a lower limit on probability repudiate the notion of Tegmark,
> Vilenkin, et al, that there are necessarily duplicate worlds to ours, if
> only we go out far enough?
I don't see why these questions are related. There are only *necessarily*
duplicate worlds if there is an infinity of worlds of a higher order than the
information content of a world.
>If you repudiate duplicate worlds, do you
> also repudiate infinite space?
Space could be infinite without there being duplicate worlds. "Repudiate" is
too strong a word. I doubt they are relevant.
>
> E.g., Alex Vilenkin ("Beyond the Big Bang," Natural History, July/August
> 2006, pp 42 - 47) says, "A new cosmic worldview holds that countless
> replicas of Earth, inhabited by our clones, are scattered throughout the
> cosmos."
>
> Vilenkin's view is that this conclusion arises from Alan Guth's theory
> of inflation and "false vacuum" put forth in 1980. The unstable false
> vacuum (which eternally inflates exponentially) has regions where random
> quantum fluctuations cause decay to a true vacuum.
You can't "go to" those different universes. Their supposed existence is
entirely dependent certain theories being correct. But those theories are
contingent on suppositions about a quantum theory of spacetime - which is not
in
hand. So, while I'm willing to entertain them as hypotheses, I neither accept
nor deny their existence.
>The difference in
> energy of the false vacuum and the true vacuum results in a "big bang."
> In the infinity of the false vacuum there are, therefore, an infinity of
> "big bangs." The big bangs don't consume the false vacuum because it
> inflates faster than the big bangs expand. Vilenkin figures the
> distance to our clone at about 10 raised to the 10^90 power, in meters.
> (This roughly agrees with Tegmark's number.) (An unanswered question is
> where and why did this initial infinity of high-energy false vacuum
> originate?)
If one can originate, then any number can. But I don't see that such an
infinity has any implications.
>
> Now 10 raised to the 10^90 power is a big number. Therefore the ratio
> of duplicate Earths to all worlds is exceedingly small - but not zero!
> Do you think it should be zero?
I think it might be of measure zero. Or there might not be any duplicate
universes.
Brent Meeker
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