The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?
Wait …is this why AI exists? So we can type Hamlet in the face of monkey failures?
Dude. Just use a printer.
Maybe it’s becaue scientists have very poor imagination of the universe.
The theorem holds true. The theorem states that the monkey has infinite time, not just the lifetime of our universe.
That’s just lazy science to change the conditions to make sensational headlines. Bad scientists!
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 that means we never would have.
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.
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.
Infinite time is perfectly defined, it just doesn’t exist in our universe
It also makes a pretty bold claim about us actually knowing the lifespan of the universe.
That’s not bold, we’ve known how long the universe will last for decades now.
Just because someone tells you something, doesn’t mean they actually know what they’re talking about. fyi
This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they’ve missed the point.
it is also somewhat misleading
…what? No it isn’t. Restricting the premise from infinite to any finite amount of time completely negates it. That doesn’t prove it’s “misleading”, it proves anyone that thinks it does has no idea what they’re talking about.
This must be a very important question to whoever keeps funding these studies.
