On 18 July 2004 Hal Finney wrote:
QUOTE-
We had some discussion a while back about a paper which proposed some
similar ideas,
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0208013, Disturbing
implications of a cosmological constant. If you want to look in the
archives, the thread was called "Doomsday-like argument in cosmology"
and was in August 2002...
...I still wonder about the physical assumptions that treat the de Sitter
state as a steady state. That little coordinate transform seemed pretty
fishy to me.
-ENDQUOTE
Yes, I know there are all sorts of twists on the standard models in
cosmology out there, most of them controversial. But what I am looking at is
the "worst case scenario" for many world theories: no "Big Crunch", no
Tipler Omega Point, no daughter universes from black holes, no God, just a
finite universe expanding and cooling forever. In a zillion years from now,
the universe will be a zillion light years across, almost all the "stable"
matter will have decayed, and the temperature will be extremely close to
absolute zero. My understanding is that even in this bleak scenario,
standard, non-controversial physics does not exclude the possibility that
new matter/energy will arise out of the vacuum. In the MWI of QM, this
possibility MUST be realised in some parallel universe, albeit one of very
low measure if the new matter is something like the event "P" I defined in
my original post, an exact copy of our solar system complete with conscious
inhabitants. In a non-MW interpretation of QM, P is possible but
fantastically unlikely. If the probability of P occuring in a unit time
period remains constant, or increases, with time, then - remember, we still
have eternity ahead even though a zillion years have already passed - P will
certainly occur. If this probability falls with time, P may or may not
occur, depending on the equation. Can anyone write down the equation showing
how Pr(P) evolves as a function of time in the above situation?
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sat Jul 17 2004 - 23:48:44 PDT