Blogosophy

Coincidence? I think notSunday night,

Coincidence? I think not

Sunday night, my friend SO the theoretical physicist was telling us about his pal Max Tegmark's Scientific American article on parallel universes. Today as I was trying to find an online copy of Lewis's Truth in Fiction article, I noticed Thoughts Arguments and Rants mentioned the parallel universe article on May 10th. Was this "just" a coincidence? Well, if you take Tegmark's article seriously it was a virtual certainty: there are infinitely many doppelgangers of me that stumbled across this link. (Of course, that doesn't guarantee that the subjective "I" must have experienced this discovery, since there are also infinitely many doppelgangers that didn't...) What struck me about this, besides the interesting classification of the "levels" of multiverses and the seemingly strong likelihood based on the current evidence that at least Level I is true (it's Borges's Library of Babel written in quantum states on volumes the size of the observable universe), was the way this relates to Huw Price's Origins of the Arrow of Time article mentioned earlier. Given a big enough Universe, the initial smoothness of our region of it may not be a puzzle at all... Posted by joshua at May 27, 2003 02:28 PM