As you may know I have an account on Patreon, where people can sign up to donate a dollar or two per episode of Mindscape. In return they get two tangible (if minor) benefits. First, they get to listen to the podcast without any ads. Second, once per month I do an Ask Me Anything episode, where patrons are allowed to ask any question they like, and I do my best to answer as many as I can.
While only patrons are allowed to asked questions, the group collectively voted to allow my answers to be made public. I’m still working out the best way to do that (it would be simplest just to include them as a bonus episode in the regular podcast feed, but there are logistical hurdles there). For the moment, I’m putting the audio on YouTube and also making the Patreon posts with my (audio) answers publicly available.
So here are the AMA answers for this month! I’ve embedded the original questions at the bottom of this post, where the transcripts usually are. (I have edited some of the original questions for length.)
My actual answers went over three hours, which was too much for Patreon to handle, so I broke it up into two parts:
Or you can just click on the YouTube videos:
Patron Jane Evans has been thoughtful enough to provide a “finding chart” to the answers, in the form of timestamps every ten questions. For Part One:
- 1-10 (Chris-Rimler) 4:25
- 11-20 (Gallay-Mirabelli) 19:47
- 21-30 (Doug C.-Meeker) 41:09
- 31-40 (Walder-Romanowski) 57:13
- 41-45 (Robinson-Dunn) 1:13:35
And for Part Two:
- 1-10 (Resnick-Abernethy) 00:12
- 11-20 (Ranjana-DJW) 17:14
- 21-30 (Rancourt- Jukimenko) 36:45
- 31-40 (Prunty-TG) 1:01:35
- 41-50 (Barber-Giustino) 1:18:26
- 51-54 (Robinson-Hess) 1:41:53
Enjoy!
[accordion clicktoclose=”true”][accordion-item tag=”p” state=closed title=”Click to Show AMA Questsions”]Click above to close.
Chris
How many hours of sleep to you average per day?
Valkhiya
If the strong nuclear force is strong enough to hold together nuclei as heavy as uranium despite electromagnetic repulsion between protons, why aren’t there much heavier isotopes of light atoms, say carbon-50? Would a nucleus composed only of neutrons be stable?
Ezra Parzybok
What does a guy like you make per year?
Jonny
what do you make of ideas like the Dyson sphere and other giant structures like that – do you think realistically it will ever be possible to build anything even remotely similar in scale?
Mitch Lindgren
I’m hoping you can comment on Eric Weinstein’s theory of “Geometric Unity,” what it actually means in terms a layperson can understand.
Judith Marsh
In John Wheeler’s book “Journey into Gravity and Spacetime” he say’s that if we were floating in space between galaxies we wouldn’t see any light from other stars or galaxies. Really! Is the space between galaxies so vast that it would be completely dark to our unaided eyes?
David Lange
Physicists have used two finely tuned optical lattice clocks, one at the base and one on the observatory floor (450 meters) of Tokyo Skytree, to make new ultraprecise measurements of the time dilation effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Time runs slightly more slowly at the base of the Skytree tower than at the top only because it’s only 450 meters tall. If it were significantly taller the top clock would dilate more because of the motion of the the Earth. Is there a name for “this point” (height of tower) at which the dilation from motion on the top level is equal to the dilation from the gravity well on the ground level?
Kirk Briggs
If the past and future are not as Eddington said “As much available to present exploration as the distant parts of space.” then I don’t see how you can justify that they are equally real. You consider yourself an Eternalist but if the past isn’t always including now “out there” on some Spacetime world-point then what is eternal about your view?
Greg Griffiths
What do recent indications that different generation process for Type 1a supernovae may have differed in prevalence in the early universe and more recently the potential anisotropy in expansion imply for the hubble constant measurement discrepancy or the contribution of dark energy?
Jesse Rimler
Recently you tweeted out a blog post by Stephen Wolfram, where he writes excitedly about a new way of conceiving the fundamental laws of physics. I enjoyed his post, and I also took note of your wise words of caution about getting too excited. My question is: why would a scientist of stature opt to post something for public consumption without submitting it to formal peer-review first?
Peter Gallay
Consider a three dimensional object falling through the plane of a two dimensional world — say a pencil falling point-first. To a two dimensional creature it would look like a point appearing out of nowhere, then widening into a disc, then disappearing. Is this in any way analagous to quantum particles materializing and disappearing – suggesting a source in a higher physical dimension?
Richard Moster
Since forces allow one object to influence another object, and since entanglement allows one object to influence another object, is there a way to express entanglement and forces in terms of one another, or are they two completely different mechanisms by which an object can influence another object?
John Hamill
You’ve discussed the idea that free will skeptics “are simply not being consistent unless they act in a really asocial … and sociopathic way”. I’m a free will skeptic. I think that the wet-meat computer in my head attempts to calculate the outcomes of various decisions; and that evolutionary influences and other factors give me a preference for outcomes that benefit me and society. Is there any part of this perspective that implies I should behave like a sociopath in order to be consistent?
Sean K. Davis
I can understand how the curvature of space causes objects to follow a curved path around a center of mass, such as the planets orbiting the Sun. What I’m having trouble understanding is how the curvature of space imparts on those objects an acceleration towards the center of mass. What am I missing?
Humberto Nanni
are the gravitational waves carrying oscillations in several directions transverse to their path of propagation like the electro and magnetic fields that travel together in the electromagnetic wave?
John Reynolds
I understand that E=MC2 relates mass to energy and that the speed of light is a factor. What I don’t understand is why C is squared.
Joseph Tangredi
My question has to do with ‘first principles’ – Can you define the word “perpendicular” without referring to 90 degree angles or similar concepts which seem to be human-invented? Is there an a priori meaning of “perpendicular” which arises wholly from the fundamental laws of physics, and which would apply for all succeeding spatial dimensions?
LINEU D MIZIARA
How close to discovering Einstein’s special relativity were Lorentz and Poincaré? How far beyond them did Einstein go? How was Poincaré’s relativity of simultaneity different from Einstein’s?
Dan O’Neill
You’ve said that when you first encountered Bell’s Theorem it wasn’t the kind of epiphanic moment for you that it has been for some other physicists. Could you say more about this? Do you think Bell’s discovery has been oversold?
Andre Mirabelli
If I have two (disjoint) intervals on a world line, how would I pick out a clock that can reliably tell me if the two intervals have the same duration (or tell me their duration ratios)? That is, how would I decide which recurrent processes are periodic?
Doug C.
Can you explain how dimensions in Hilbert space relate to the wave function and the measurement problem?
Niraj Dube
I’m confused by the different explanations given by physicists regarding what space is made of. Is it purely a mathematical/geometrical construct and therefore has no physical constituent(s), or does it (the “fabric”) comprise of something physical such that it can be “loopy” / “frothy” at the Planck scale?
Riverside
I hear your point that unlikely branches of the many-worlds universe are proportionally less frequent than the likely ones. Still I do not see how this justifies a conclusion that the Many-Worlds Theory should not affect our everyday moral choices. Failing to conduct a regular technical check-up of your car is a somewhat risky behaviour in the stochastic environment but it is an inevitable manslaughter in the Many-Worlds universe: someone will die as a result of this oversight in some, however small, portion of near-infinite pool of branching worlds.
Zayitch Kanzler
I’ve listened to your Higgs Boson and Beyond lectures and the Something Deeply Hidden audiobook, and I hear “renormalization” come up as a pivotal solution to some nasty problems involving infinities. I’m wondering: where do these infinities come from, why are they troublesome, and how does renormalization pacify them?
Dr Paul Meggs
Is there a short answer to “How does simply having the wave function of the universe evolving according to the Schroedinger equation lead directly and unambiguously to an Everettian many-worlds universe”?
Daniel Fox
my son just recently heard of Eric Weinstein’s Gravity Unification theory. Since the subject is rearing its ugly head again, can you please just briefly explain your opinion of it?
Deepthi Amarasuriya
When we speak of cosmic occurrences e.g. specific fundamental forces separating out 10 ^ – [ ] s after the Big Bang, what “Big Clock” are we referring to, given that time intervals are not absolute?
Brendan Hall
Do you have any personal interest in your heritage? Some seem to enjoy learning about their own genealogy, while others see their family history as less meaningful or totally irrelevant.
Joshua Hillerup
Have you had to learn new to you areas of mathematics since you stopped being a student, and if you have how do you prefer going about learning those areas?
Brent Meeker
I notice you tend to avoid the problem of branching by assuming there are an almost infinite number of indistinguishable “worlds” prior to a measurement, so the measurement is really a splitting of worlds. This is much more plausible than saying a 50/50 measurement creates two branches but a 50.1/49.9 creates a thousand. But it seems that the Born rule is still just and axiom and there is no mechanism within the Schroedinger equation to produce this splitting; and so there’s no description of exactly when the split develops.
P Walder
Stephen Wolfram’s new theory shows the graph separating seeming to imply the existence of two separate universes. Would the disconnected pieces of the graph appear as black holes due to the event horizon?
Justin Bailey
Gravity is typically illustrated by for example putting a bowling ball on a flat sheet and talking about how the sheet is depressed. But space is three-dimensional so is there a better visualization for gravity than the classic bowling ball on a rubber sheet?
Stefan Bernegger
Why are you so sceptic about Wolfram’s initiative: Is it the process (channels) he has chosen or is there something fundamentally flawed with the idea?
RudyM
Do you think that some of the answers concerning the nature of consciousness can be partially answered within the realm of quantum mechanics in physics?
Simon Carter
I am really enjoying your Biggest ideas in the universe series. What study do you do before each episode or is it the case that you know all the different subjects off the top of your head?
Ricardo Razera
Could you explain an experiment that would test Many-Worlds vs Copenhagen in QM?
Benjamin Feddersen
A thought experiment: an observer is inside a satellite no windows, in orbit around a gravity well. In the room is a computer terminal, connected to a main tower outside the room by a cable…let’s say it’s running Minecraft. When the observer begins to play, they notice the framerate is lagging abnormally. Would there be any way for that observer to tell whether the lag is caused by the main tower being lowered into the gravity well and being subjected to time dilation or, rather, by another person in the room next door trying to run another instance of the program at the same time? If not, would this represent another equivalence principle, similar to the equivalence between gravity and acceleration? And what might be the implications of that?
Ross Hastings
What are your favourite physics books written by other authors? Is there a particular book or books you consider to be a must-read?
Santiago Torres
What are your thoughts on the tension between individual rights and economic growth versus public health that we’re seeing play out throughout the country in response to the Coronavirus crisis? It seems that stay-at-home orders are really the only effective tool we currently have right now, but an outspoken minority of the public and politicians are growing impatient.
Perry Romanowski
When you’re not an expert on a topic but want to have an informed opinion, what is your strategy for developing that opinion?
Ian Robinson
Any further thoughts on the Stephen Wolfram and collaborators computational view of reality? Beyond your initial thoughts posted to Twitter.
Manuel Bevand
Do you think about anthropic reasoning is a valuable intellectual tool?
Cam Umbers
Could you recommend some classic papers in your areas of interest for the more advanced but very much amateur physics fan? For context, I’m a landscape gardener and carpenter but spend my work days listening to lectures and my free time studying mathematics.
Paul Torek
In the Carroll-Chen 2004 model of baby universes being born with low entropy, the babies spring from random fluctuations of the vacuum in the parent universe. Is there any way to avoid also getting lots of Boltzmann Brains from similar fluctuations? Can we have this explanation of our universe’s low entropy, and also be reasonably confident we aren’t Boltzmann Brains?
Murray Dunn
At some point in a podcast you mentioned working on an iPad Pro. Would you talk a bit about what programs you use, your work flow, and how you organize iPad your work, and any tips or tricks for recording equations.
ben resnick
Assuming Many-Worlds and the time-symmetry of the laws of physics, isn’t it always a possibility (however remote) that a world could evolve to its previous state and given that all worlds that could exist do exist, that there will always be a world which appears to evolve backwards in time in comparison with our own world (or any particular world for that matter)?
Paul Hardie
I’ve heard it said that the big bang was the beginning of time. But also our universe might be part of a multiverse or a pocket universe or arose from something earlier. So wouldn’t time have to exist for that earlier thing to be around? Confused.
Crabby Smales
Two months back you took issue with correlating low physical entropy with low algorithmic information content.
Do you see no positive relation even when distinguishing between *microstates*?
The relation I was trying to draw was between compressibility of *microdescriptions* and entropy. Low entropy macrostates more tightly *constrain*, and thus provide more information about, the possible microstates.
The unusual high-entropy microstates compatible with evolution to a medium entropy present require stating in detail, at high information cost to a model. However we can effectively specify compatible microstates that happen to be low entropy simply by giving the macrostate.
Sigurd Enghoff
Is it conceivable that the Universe could have started in a higher entropy state? – if so, how might the early universe have appeared and have evolved differently?
Martin Czigler
In your interview with pro poker player Liv Boeree, you discussed playing game theoretic optimal. Have you studied that yourself, and if so, do you recommend that a relative novice study it? If not, can you recommend one or two training tactics that you found to be most helpful for improving your skills?
Jayden Hammet
What are the major contending theories for mass generation of the neutrino? Which is your favourite?
–
Help! There’s a temporal anomaly in my kitchen. Time ticks slower on one side of the room than the other. It’s really weird! When I throw a banana across the room, the banana arcs towards the slow side. _everything_ is drifting towards the slow side of the room! My cat is walking on the slow side of the room! _I’m_ drifting towards the slow side of the room! And when I try to push away from the slow side, I drift right on back.
I’d like some intuitions for how time anomalies cause acceleration: intuitions that are more physically intuitive than “bananas magically move themselves to maximize their proper time”.
lothian53
If a particle has a wave function that distributes its location evenly over a large area, Then I interact with it causing it to take a real position in my world, does that mean that for every point on the wave function, other worlds also split off and have their own world with the particle found at every possible location?
Jan Luszczek
Is infinity a useful abstract concept that helps with mathematical concepts only, or is infinity actually a reality in the natural world? Can time for example be infinite?
Raymond Abernethy
Could you explain what quantum error correction entails?
Suraj Rajan
Just finished the book, and I have been re-listening to the last 2 chapters over and over; there is so much jam-packed in there. I am still struggling to understand what you mean by “degrees of freedom” in Chapter 14. Is this a “stand-in” or a euphemism for something more fundamental?!
Sandro Stucki
My question is about when macroscopic objects cause decoherence.
How can a quantum system like a photon or an electron remain in a coherent superposition while interacting with a macroscopic object such as a beam splitter or a screen with a double slit but not when interacting with the measurement apparatus (or an observer, or the environment)? Why doesn’t the photon’s quantum state decohere with overwhelming probably when it hits the beam splitter causing us to observe “classical” behavior instead of interference?
George Sharabidze
[multiple questions, picked one]
In your work “Dark Meter with Time-Dependent Mass” you state that “As the universe expands, the density of of particles decreases,” does it mean that along side with density the volume of the particles are affected too and consequently wave function and “clock” of the particles?
Dmytro Shevchenko
Immanuel Kant famously believed that space and time, as we know them, are a priori notions in our minds that allow us to perceive the world a posteriori. According to Kant’s transcendental idealism, we don’t have access to the nature of space and time, and we can’t possibly know empirically whether they actually exist. 200+ years later, do we now have reasons to believe we will get to know what space and time really are?
TruePath (Peter Gerdes)
So I often hear discussions about the arrow of time talking about the need to explain the fact that there was a low entropy time in the universe.
However, entropy is only defined relative to a choice of macroscopic observables. Has there been any work that tries to consider what fraction of the possible initial conditions would result in a low entropy state relative to *some* notion of macroscopic observables creatures in that world might have?
sklogw
In ‘Something Deeply Hidden’, among other things you propose that what we perceive as physical proximity is an emergent phenomenon of entanglement. Experiments have shown that, once entangled, particles can be physically separated over large distances and stay entangled. How is that fact reconciled with the idea that entanglement causes us to perceive physical proximity?
Mikhail Korobko
Wojiech Zurek in his “existential interpretation” of QM argues, that although the Universe as a whole is a quantum wavefunction, once we select one classical world as our observed branch, there’s no reason to treat other branches as equally real. In fact, there is only this branch, and the rest of the universe is simply in the mixed quantum state. Such argument seems to avoid some philosophical problems of many-worlds, where multiple persons exist in different branches. While I understand that branching is in principle a matter of convenience, why do you treat other branches as equally real.
Anders
William Lane Craig insists that there exists an absolute reference frame (God’s view). Does this break anything in special and general relativity or is it just an unnecessary assumption?
Dan Inch
In the many worlds interpretation of QM, certain events can cause the universe to split and branch off. Could anything make the worlds “rejoin” so that their futures are realigned?
Clive Thompson
Assume two absolutely identical universes spring into existence at the exact same moment. Identical, that is, except for one fluke difference: biology emerges in Universe A some eight billion years into the picture and continues for at least billions of years. Which universe experiences heat death first? Does biology retard or accelerate entropy?
DJW
Why isn’t the 2nd law of thermodynamics considered to be ‘a’, if not ‘the’ solution to the 1st law? [considered here on the scale of the Universe, i.e. the ‘Big Picture’]
Gary Rancourt
Why is Fermi’s beta decay paper regarded as one of the greatest contributions to 20th Century physics?
Ian Morgan
How about doing a sort of “runners and riders” thing where you discuss the main theories being put forward for the Unification of Quantum and Classical physics? I am a little confused about the status of String Theory, it has been knocking around for at least 30 years now and although many physicists are working away like crazy at it, there does not seem to be any prospect of it ever replacing or being added to the existing model.
Charlie Morris
Can you give some insight on free will . I’m an engineer and I live in a Newtonian clockwork universe. I think the direction that an electron flows is only physics. Could you comment.
Jack Parkin
During your conversation with Kevin Hand you guys talked excitedly about Gibbs Free Energy. Would you be willing to talk a little more about it’s importance to life?
Spencer Hargiss
Do you think many worlds (either in a quantum sense or an infinite universe sense) have any implications for our understanding of history? for example the Cuban missile crisis.
George Faulkner
The recent NY Times obit on mathematician John Conway referred to the “free will theorem” and its connection to the Kochen-Specker theorem related to quantum mechanics. As a naturalist, I don’t accept “contra-causal free will” and that humans or other creatures have such. So, I wonder if you can explain what is meant by this use here, or if maybe Conway, etc. should have used different terminology that’s less loaded with free will baggage.
Fadi Younes
Considering that the chances of the LHC finding evidence for supersymmetry are now pretty low and the prospects of building a bigger particle collider are slim, what are your present credences for string theory being the theory of everything and what track do you think physics should follow in pursuit of the theory of everything ?
Stephan Arlinghaus
In 1977, the Voyager Golden Record took diverse portrays of the diversity of life and culture on Earth to outer space together with instructions on how the record is supposed to be understood by any life out there lucky enough to pick it up.
Imagine the Human Genome Project was already completed back in 1977. I wonder whether it might have been a good idea to put the information on human DNA onto the Record, thus sending the possibility to outer space that humans might be reproduced — and in some way may live — far away in both time and space on alien worlds, slim as the chance of that may be.
Paulina Barren
Hi Sean, is there a question you would like to answer which has never been asked? 🙂
I would love to hear about it.
Alex Jukimenko
Is there a way to have a representation/transformation when potential energy and kinetic energy “look” the same?
Thomas Prunty
Could you recommend a technical reference for decoherence as it relates to many worlds? It’s not something you typically see in QM textbooks or classes!
Gerard Druiven
I wonder, if I was a scientist. But. I am as large as an atom. Questions is, could I detect the sun.
I do not think I can see it, with these bright little eyes.
Gabor Peter Cser
My question is about black holes. We know that General Relativity is not applicable at the singularity. I am aware of the holographic principle according to which the information content is proportional to the surface of the event horizon instead of the volume of a black hole. Can you imagine an experiment or observation that would result the lost of GR’s applicability not only at the singularity but at the event horizon of a black hole?
Gregory Kusnick
What’s your Bacon number? [3, via morgan freeman or colbert]
fiatowner
When I read Steven Weinberg’s “First Three Minutes”, how should I think about those “three minutes”? My understanding is that gravity affects “time”, so is there something special given the extraordinary conditions that prevailed then?
Doug Eltoft
Would a theory of quantum gravity be equivalent to a theory of quantum spacetime?
John Brady
Without asking you to do a lot of research and since the project only official started on April 14th … just curious as to whether you have any first impressions on the Wolfram Physics Project.
James Kittock
I’m fascinated by the idea that according to our current understanding of the expansion of the universe, there will come a time when sentient observers in the merged Milky Way-Andromeda galaxy won’t be able to see anything in the universe beyond their galaxy, and the CMB will have cooled beyond detectability.
Would those observers have any hope of deducing the history of the universe as we understand it today?
Jonas
SR is the formalism that makes the equations describing the world look the same for all observers moving with constant speed with respect to each other.
Is it correct to interpret GR in the same way, ie as the formalism that makes the equations describing the world look the same for all accelerated observers, or is it something more than that needed to be assumed in GR in order to ”get gravity”?
TG
Hi Sean, when people refer to time passing more slowly close to a large gravitational mass, how much of that is due to being accelerated through curved spacetime vs just being in a curved spacetime?
Gordon Bamber
My question is about angular momentum.
Spinning stars can collapse into millisecond neutron stars which are amazing objects, but how about if the collapse continues towards a Black Hole? Before the singularity is reached, can the spin increase to the point where the “equator” moves at the speed of light?
Maksym Aleksandrowicz
According to many worlds interpretation, everytime we choose diet coke over regular one, the wave function colapses, and since creating a whole perfectly balanced universe costs 0 energy, we are responsible for creating a lot of other universes.
As far as I understand moving the real conciousness between those worlds would require some new type of force, in addition to the four we all know and love, so it is technically out of the question. But since we created a lot of other well balanced universes, populated with some fake characters, wouldn’t they simply carry on as psychological zombies in a world without concious observer?
Einars
Dear prof. Carroll, does the MWI basically say that “everything happens”?! Everything, allowed by the rules of nature, of course. Is it not a bit “wasteful”?
Paul Cousin
I’d really like to have some podcast recommendations from you. Science or anything else.
Jeremy Labrecque
If a photon of wavelength x is traveling and encounters a photon of the same phase it results in constructive interference. If that photon meets the same other photon half a wavelength further, it will be out of phase with the other photon and will result in destructive interference. I thought that photons don’t experience time because they travel at the speed of light but we get two different outcomes when it encounters the same photon at two different positions. What has changed about the photon in that period so that we get two different outcomes when interfering with the same photon?
jhon jack
As a graduate student that works on theoretical fluid Dynamics I have always being a bit jealous of the attention fundamental physics gets with the public.
I have seen a lot of people (and even qualified fundamental physicists) that consider the theory of turbulence and other theoretical problems of fluid Dynamics as a practical problem or a problem to be left to the engineers and modelers.
Why do you think this is the case?
Bryce Graham
I’m trying to understand the following quote by Herman Weyl,
“The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.”
I’ve heard the block universe model of time described as a music record. Just as the past, present and future are real the entire song exists on the record. However, we only experience a single instant of time at a time, just as the needle on a record only plays a single note of the song.
In this analogy what could be considered our “needle” with respect to the block universe?
Frank J Kockritz
Should further studies lead to overcoming the initial skepticism from a new study, using analyzed data from Chandra X-ray Observatory, observing a quasar at approximately 1 billion years from big bang and suggesting that the cosmological constant appears to have changed during the subsequent 12.8 billion year expansion while accompanied by “large-scale anisotropy”, might alter your thinking, one way or the other with regard to Eternal Inflation Theory?
Tripp Denison
Recently I started reading Iain Banks’ Culture series because you often bring it up in discussions about futuristic or conjectural sociology, economics, AI. I was expecting a cerebral, philosophical story but have been surprised by how brutally violent the first novel is. Do you have opinions about violence in fiction and media?
Antonio Giustino
I would appreciate some help better understanding the fundamental qualities of space and space inflation/expansion which have always confused me.
Space expansion accelerates between the galaxies but not in a galaxy. Is that because: 1) Gravity keeps the actual space fabric from expanding, OR 2) Gravity keeps the particles in relative distance together while the fabric still expands.
George Robinson
The multiworlds version of QM explains away some of the mystery of measurement. But what does it say about the mystery of entanglement? Given an entangled system we can calculate the outcome of an experiment, but what can we say about the nature of entanglement?
Oria Biddle
Do you know what we’re to expect to see in the Fall of 2021 when we start getting the first images back from the James Webb Space Telescope? Very excited for this!
Tony Ciafardoni
If you were given power to magically solve/answer any ONE open problem or question in physics that currently defies our understanding/knowledge which one would it be an why?
Paul Hess
In your Katie Mack interview you said that you don’t believe there will be quantum fluctuations in the far future, because there would not be an observer measuring the quantum state of the universe. Why is an observer necessary to affect whether or not there are fluctuations? For example wouldn’t a Boltzmann Brain observe itself?
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