Just check out this article from today’s New York Times:
It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.
f 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. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so there in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.
I’d like to think that if I really was just a giant brain floating in space somewhere, I’d be able to dream up a better reality than this.
January 15th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
No doubt this would have some stark metaphysical implications. Roll out the carpet for all of the idealists, because they have been chomping at the bit for a chance to redeem themselves. However, I as well have some skeptical disposition to something as absurd as that. Only time will tell.
January 15th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
David,
You know, I’d respond to you, but since I’m really just a giant brain floating somewhere in the universe, you’re obviously just a figment of my imagination
January 16th, 2008 at 12:52 am
Haha, it’s funny how all of us are simultaneously figments of each others imagination!