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Are You a Boltzmann Brain? Unearth the Mind-Bending Theory [1]
['Mark Frauenfelder']
Date: 2023-11-08
I was reading Wikipedia's fascinating "Timeline of the Far Future" article, which is full of mind-warping events that will occur in the next 100 years and beyond.
You might think things would get boring at the 110 trillion year mark, the "time by which all stars in the universe will have exhausted their fuel," but that's really just the beginning of the weirdness to come. After 10-to-the-10th-to-the-50th years, the universe could see its first Boltzmann brain "appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease."
The idea of a Boltzmann Brain was proposed by physicist Ludwig Boltzmann in the late 1800s. The core idea is that in an eternally fluctuating universe, over an infinite amount of time, a functioning human brain could spontaneously emerge due to random thermal fluctuations. This "Boltzmann brain" would have false memories of a coherent life history.
Are you a Boltzmann Brain? It's hard to say! Even Brian Randolph Greene, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, can't prove he isn't a Boltzmann Brain. He said, "I am confident that I am not a Boltzmann brain. However, we want our theories to similarly concur that we are not Boltzmann brains, but so far it has proved surprisingly difficult for them to do so."
This seems similar to the "how long would it take for X number of monkeys to type out Hamlet?" From Wikipedia:
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