Sure is quiet around here. I can’t blog much, as I’m in the final throes of book-writing. So instead, let’s have some user-generated content!
Here is a figure that I’ve drawn for use in my book.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out what the figure is supposed to be illustrating, and what lesson is purportedly conveyed. (Hint: that’s supposed to be an egg.) How hard can it be?
If it’s a fruitful exercise, we can repeat for other figures, similarly inscrutable.
Mumble mumble Boltzman mumble.
But I’ve read your blog. It’s a nice illustration, but there should be text along with it, and a detailed caption for those of us who buy science books just to look at the pictures.
Boltzmann’s egg. LOL 🙂
I was going to say that the pictures look like an excellent illustration that shows how unscrambled eggs can form from a cloud of nebular material, and that the egg is not to scale. I’d probably also say something about the captions being deliberately left off to confuse the matter and imply some sort of massive improbability. But I won’t know whether or not this very speculative material will be accurately labelled as such until the book comes out.
Well, it obviously tells a story about ants encountering an egg and making an omelet using the one they found and a 2nd one.
I have an awesome answer to the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
It is not PG13 though, so I suspect it won’t be in Sean’s book :(.
(The answer is : the cock came first).
“But I won’t know whether or not this very speculative material will be accurately labelled as such until the book comes out.”
Just like to correct you there: there is nothing speculative about what Sean is driving at here. The early universe was indisputably in a state of fantastically low entropy, and nowadays very few people would dispute Sean’s claim that a Boltzmann fluctuation can explain that. True, Sean does have some speculative ideas about how to *explain* that extraordinary state of affairs, but that is a different matter. In short: what Sean is pointing to here is neither speculative nor controversial.
There *is* a sort of pseudo-controversy raised by certain cranks who deny that the origin of the second law of thermodynamics is to be found in cosmology. But that’s a “controversy” of precisely the same kind as the creationist “controversy”.
Sorry, “can explain” should of course be “can’t” !!
Well, no Pope, you’re wrong about the correction. Possibly because you haven’t read all of the thread. Sean claims that just as partially-assembled cracked eggs are much more likely to have formed from a statistical fluctuation than a whole complete egg, so it is that Boltzmanns Brains are more likely – much more likely – than a statistical flucuation that brings our perceived universe into being. He’s been told many times by many people that as formulated, this is just plain incorrect. Or if you prefer, a wild speculation. He’s done things like the above to show his argument, but when people point out that no, make the mass of particles not particularly large and it becomes much more likely that whole eggs form rather than partial eggs, and he shifts the grounds to ‘well, we’re not talking about an undifferentiated mass of particles anyway.’ In which case, his analogy is similarly flawed. There’s a more sophisticated way to put this, of course, and that’s what most of Sean’s fellow physicist believe. The Boltzmann Brain argument really doesn’t have a lot of followers in the mainstream. Again, for pretty clear and easy to explain reasons about how to count states, conditional probabilities, etc.
That’s not to say that most physicists believe that the universe arose spontaneously as a statistical flucuation, of course. Just that if you don’t believe it did, this argument is not the way to go about proving it.
The sequence in question illustrates viewer experience watching a digitally broadcast cooking program on an analog tv using a cheap converter.
dwight, you seem to be claiming that given a “large mass of particles” a low entropy state is more likely to arise as a statistical fluctuation than a high entropy state. This makes no sense to me, even after reading the whole thread. If there is a “clear and easy to explain” reason for this, then please explain it rather than simply asserting that such an explanation exists.
Pope Maledict XVI Says: `The early universe was indisputably in a state of fantastically low entropy, and nowadays very few people would dispute Sean’s claim that a Boltzmann fluctuation can explain that.’
I do not dispute the claim that the early universe was in a state of fantastically low entropy.
I do dispute the claim that a Boltzmann fluctuation can explain that. Who claims that anyway?
The whole point of the Boltzmanns Brains argument is that a Boltzmann fluctuation can explain the universe one observes only if solipsism is true. Obviously you should look elsewhere for an explanation.
@Eugene: I totally lol-ed at that.
Poincare Recurrence
Just how fast do you work?!!
Define “before”.
Slightly sinosodal interpritation of time ay with the egg joining then breaking again?
If a egg can appear then so can a chicken, seen as a there is enough potential information in there to create one? If the chickens mind can reach a low enough state of entropy it can create itself the universe, human beings and then lay the information for the egg in the box for someone to create your experiment then escape and live free range in someone’s back garden. Then seen as it unlikely that it will ever happen again, it will be impossible for the humans to realise that God is fact a free-range chicken and that’s really why chicken taste like everything! 🙂
The Chicken God http://www.threadless.com/submission/41273/The_Chicken_God
Pure stupidity. If this does not tell you that everything comes from nothing, then nothing will.
Yeah, nothing will 🙂
Uhm, a stupid question, since the fluctuation answer has already been marked:
If we read in a few frames where the arrows are, with greater structural density towards the middles of each chain of arrows, do we also have a diagram (of an analogy) of the evolution of two FLRW universes where Omega > 1 and where the bottom one is a conventional “Big Crunch/Big Bang” oscillation while the top one has much more dark energy?
Stupider question: how would one distinguish between being in the lower type of Universe from being somewhere in a longer chain comprising these two subchains at a time after an expansion from a period where the universe is hot and dense enough for GUT physics and some later period hot and dense enough for BBNS?
Stupidest question: can they be linked together in a chain in the sort of “extra-universe filled with multiple universes following different arrows of time” model you have been exploring?
Waaaay out there: is there an equivalence between a fluctuation model where a Boltzmann Brain and its environment appears “ex nihilo” and a continuous model where we only at a few selected points along a timelike axis? (I.e., in your diagrams do we have snapshot at sparsest boundary condition, snapshot at some intermediate point on the order of tens of Gy before the hottest densest boundary condition, a snapshot at the hottest densest boundary, another snapshot at some intermediate point on the order of tens of Gy after the hottest densest boundary condition, and a snapshot at the sparsest boundary; or do we definitely have a diagram as described in Jason and Ted’s comments, and as criticized by “Fluctuation”‘s comment?)
This is about intelligent design, is it not? I mean, really, creating an egg from nothing? It’s far more likely that you just get scattered yolk than an egg, therefore, there must have been an intelligent designer that formed that beautiful egg. Duh.
The 2-nd line:
the egg in the midlle = our present state
most probable Past and Future to the left and right – should be symmetric!
the fact that our actual Past is very different represents a puzzle that need to be explained
The top line, “Someone broke an egg”.
The bottom line, “OK, who’s playing silly buggers?”