infinitefloatingbrains' profile

Info

Joined: March 17, 2008

Contributions

MeFi: 8 posts , 330 comments
MetaTalk: 0 posts , 43 comments
Ask MeFi: 8 questions , 157 answers
Music: 0 posts , 0 comments, 0 playlists
Music Talk: 0 posts, 0 comments
Projects: 6 posts, 4 comments, 15 votes
Jobs: 0 posts
IRL: 0 posts, 0 comments
FanFare: 0 posts, 0 comments
FanFare Talk: 0 posts, 0 comments

View all activity

Favorites: 1645
Favorited by others: 1280

I help fund MetaFilter!

Social

Links to: 12 users
Linked by: 5 users
MeFi tags: photography (3) art (2) advertising (2) commercialmusic (1) commercial (1) chrisware (1) capitalism (1) awards (1) artist (1) adagencies (1)
Ask MeFi tags: photography (4) artist (2) food (2) photo (2) csx (1) corprateart (1) copyright (1) commercialart (1) ChuckNorris (1) archive (1)

About

What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

"And so 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.

Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agrees this overabundance is absurd, pointed out that some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.” Welcome to what physicists call the Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested the mechanism by which such fluctuations could happen in a gas or in the universe. Cosmologists also refer to them as “freaky observers,” in contrast to regular or “ordered” observers of the cosmos like ourselves. Cosmologists are desperate to eliminate these freaks from their theories, but so far they can’t even agree on how or even on whether they are making any progress."

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?ref=science