It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.
If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.
This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit.
Norlanderon January 16 2008 11:16:27
That is one weird read, but it's interesting where probability statistics and cosmology will take you.
Vuzmanon January 16 2008 17:53:09
Occam says this is stupid.
Norlanderon January 16 2008 18:15:41
Well the simplest explanation as I read it is that time can go backwards as well as forwards - then all of this is needless. So Occam approves of time travel?
The Boltzmann brain problem arises from a string of logical conclusions that all spring from another deep and old question, namely why time seems to go in only one direction.
