Re: Infinite universe

From: Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 17:35:30 MDT


"Tomaz Kristan" <me2icq@icqmail.com> writes:
> Infinitely many of other worlds?
>
> Are they all (a majority of them) older?

The concept of "majority" makes little sense in an infinite context,
at least not unless you define an appropriate measure.

> Are they all (a majority of them) more complicated than
> this one?

What do you mean by "complicated"? Are you referring to, say, the
Chaitin-Kolmogrov information of each of them? If so, what do you mean
by a "world"? I'd say that our planet itself is probably of average
Chaitin-Kolmogrov information for an object of its size.

> If every second pops up another zillion of worlds, then
> our is the Nth youngest.

That makes no sense in an infinte context.

> Then, are there countably many Universes? Uncountably
> Infinite? Continuum many? Aleph No. 992399 for example?
>
> A transaleph number of them?
>
> A transconstructible number of them?

In the Level I universe (using the terminology we've been discussing),
there are countably many universes for obvious reasons. In the
Level III universe, there would also (I think) be countably many
universes, because there are only finitely many quantum states any
given volume of space could assume. At Level II, I must confess I
don't understand the whole "chaotic perpetual inflation" thing well
enough to grok but I'd guess "countable". At Level IV, if
metamathematics follows the rules we've established for it in the last
120 years or so (i.e. we are talking about formal systems), by
definition the set of all possible formal systems is countable.

So it would appear that the answer to all your questions might be
"countable".

> I am sceptic as hell.

I must admit to a certain scepticism about all of this -- all the
ideas are too new and certainly haven't withstood the test of
time. However, it is no more reasonable that the universe be finite
than that it be infinite (IMHO). The particular details we have could
of course all be wrong -- we'll need a few hundred more years of study
I suspect. I'll be watching the work with interest.

Perry



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