Sean Carroll reports here on some other parts of the festival, including the panel on Time Since Einstein, where he explained to the audience that “the fact that an a splattered egg cannot turn back into a pristine unbroken egg is the best evidence we have that we live in a multiverse.”
...“the fact that an a splattered egg cannot turn back into a pristine unbroken egg is the best evidence we have that we live in a multiverse.”
Since the microscopic laws of physics are (effectively) time-symmetric, all that I come up with is that there are far fewer initial conditions where splattered eggs unsplatter than where splattered eggs remain splattered. This is a fact independent of cosmology***. Whole pristine eggs do not arise from a process of unsplattering, other methods are far more probable.
I need to broaden the question - "explain a universe in which eggs and observers like myself can arise", before there is a mystery. It remains a mystery. But it is an even deeper philosophical mystery as to how postulating an infinite number of other universes so that the asymmetry in initial conditions can somehow be erased*** constitutes an explanation.
*** The fact that there are far fewer initial states that lead to splattered eggs unsplattering than initial states where splattered eggs remain splattered is simply a matter of counting and so remains true in each universe in the multiverse.
------
Believe it or not, Sean Carroll now has Feynman's old desk at Caltech!
Sean Carroll needs to look up the meaning and etymology of the word "evidence."
ReplyDeleteWhat he really means is that by creating an infinity of invisible and unobservable other universes he can make a slightly more plausible case for avoiding coming up with a new law that might explain our universe.
He's doing theology here, not science.
CIP