Comment on Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds

PetteriPano@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• Botzo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they’ve missed the point.

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• ogmios@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It also makes a pretty bold claim about us actually knowing the lifespan of the universe.

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  • scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    How are they defining the end of the universe?

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    • BennyInc@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Probably very shortly after dinner has been served at that restaurant.

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      • 0x0@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I think that was just a galaxy, not the whole universe.

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    • Klear@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The universe is believed to end just a few nanoseconds before a monkey finishes writing Hamlet.

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    • HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Heat death would be my assumption, so between about 10^100 and 10^106 years

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    • ogmios@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      We know such an infinitesimally small amount about what is actually happening in the universe that any claims to be capable of predicting it’s end are patently absurd.

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  • Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s not bold, we’ve known how long the universe will last for decades now.

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• 0x0@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  the monkey has infinite time

  Use an infinite number of monkeys instead?

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• scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Infinite time is undefined though. We are not sure there was time before the Big Bang. Before anyone says “but there must have been,” consider that it’s just as paradoxical and mind blowing to imagine that time never had a beginning and just stretches infinitely into the past. How can that be so? It means it would have taken an infinite amount of time for us to reach this moment in time, and never would have.

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  • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Infinite time is perfectly defined, it just doesn’t exist in our universe

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  • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Why must the concept of time before the big bang (or after our heat death) exist in our physical reality for us to speculate about theoretical infinities past those? The thought experiment is about ~infinite~ time, not all the time in our limited universe. A lot of things happen at infinity that break down as soon as you add a limit, but we’re not talking limits when we’re talking infinity.

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  • Starbuncle@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think the implications behind there being infinite time in the past are fun if you assume that the universe works like a stochastic state machine. It means that either every finite event that has happened and will happen has already happened an infinite number of times or the universe is infinitely large.

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