Well, yes, I knew someone would mention that when I typed it! And yes, I agree, the Beckenstein bound implies that - although isn't that dealing with information, rather than quantum states (leaving aside any it-from-bitness, at least) ? Or maybe the two are equivalent.
I'm not sure how (or if) Max got around that one when he did his calculation of the distance of the nearest duplicate, but given that the answer came out as something like 10 ^ 10 ^ 28 metres, that makes the surface area to volume ratio awfully low for any sphere enclosing both... Max also calculates the distance to the nearest identical 100-lightyear sphere and nearest identical Hubble volume, and it looks to me as though he's assuming 3D space operates as Euclidean geometry would predict. To be exact, he says that These are extremely conservative estimates, derived simply by counting all possible quantum states that a Hubble volume can have if it is no hotter than 10^8 kelvins. One way to do the calculation is to ask how many protons could be packed into a Hubble volume at that temperature. The answer is 10^118 protons. Each of those particles may or may not, in fact, be present, which makes for 2^10^118 possible arrangements of protons. A box containing that many Hubble volumes exhausts all the possibilities. FYI the article is here http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/PDF/multiverse_sciam.pdf -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
