8/19/2023 0 Comments Monkey type![]() In another place he adds color to what this would really entail. So the multiverse and the infinitely many copies of you and me that Brian Greene seems so eager to assume must exist out there (where, exactly?) mean absolutely nothing and really have no place in any scientific argument about nature, life, and our universe and where it came from.” (pp. It you ‘go to infinity’ (whatever that may mean, since infinity is inaccessible to us), you can pretend to prove anything. It’s just like proving that a monkey can type Hamlet despite the unreality of the whole idea: the only reason it works is that infinity is such an overwhelmingly powerful concept. It is simply a ‘forcing argument’ that allows you to prove anything you like. And it isn’t science, since it’s not based on any reality, any experimentation, or even any viable theory. So playing the ‘monkey typing Hamlet’ game is not a good approach to real-life situations, and real universes-of which we know only one. It is simply a mathematical fact that has no meaning outside the realm of pure mathematics and does not describe the real world in any way. Making the number of trials equal to infinity ‘forces’ the answer to be 100 percent. So the probability of getting it right the first time (leaving out spaces and punctuation, which would make it even more difficult) is one divided by 26 raised to the power 150,000, which is a number very, very close to zero-but not identically zero. The play has about thirty thousand words, and if we assume an average of five letters per word, that is about 150,000 characters that the monkey needs to get right and in sequence. If you allow infinity to enter any argument, anything can happen-even monkeys typing Hamlet. “The heart of the argument here is the immense power of infinity. In his book Why Science Does not Disprove God Amir Aczel explains how this really does not work. All this talk of fine tuning means nothing since infinite time plus matter will eventually produce a universe that can sustain life. Atheists and skeptics like to use this to illustrate the point that given the current theory of the multiverse which posits an infinite number of universes it is only natural that a universe like ours will exist so there is really nothing special about it. If the monkey has an infinite amount of time it will happen. The idea is that no matter how impossible it might seem it’s just a matter of time. ![]() Give a monkey an infinite amount of time on a typewriter and he/she will eventually type out Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.
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