The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59418 Message #2236892
Posted By: Amos
15-Jan-08 - 09:21 AM
Thread Name: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
Did you? I am sorry. But here's hope from the New York Times science department:
"Another contentious issue is whether the cosmologists in their calculations could consider only the observable universe, which is all we can ever see or be influenced by, or whether they should take into account the vast and ever-growing assemblage of other bubbles forever out of our view predicted by eternal inflation. In the latter case, as Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University pointed out, "The numbers of regular and freak observers are both infinite." Which kind predominate depends on how you do the counting, he said..
In eternal inflation, the number of new bubbles being hatched at any given moment is always growing, Dr. Linde said, explaining one such counting scheme he likes. So the evolution of people in new bubbles far outstrips the creation of Boltzmann brains in old ones. The main way life emerges, he said, is not by reincarnation but by the creation of new parts of the universe. "So maybe we don't need to care too much" about the Boltzmann brains," he said.
"If you are reincarnated, why do you care about where you are reincarnated?" he asked. "It sounds crazy because here we are touching issues we are not supposed to be touching in ordinary science. Can we be reincarnated?"
"People are not prepared for this discussion," Dr. Linde said.
..."
This article may be the most inchoate piece of writing I have yet seen in the Gray Lady, perhaps good evidence of early-onset Alzheimer's in her corporate consciousness. Or this may jsut be a reflection of the hard task of cosmologists, doomed to ponder the imponderable and reason about the unreasonable.
A