Assuming the universe has no end can we assume everything will eventually happen, subject to its inviolable laws?
This is better suited to GD.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Shouldn’t time and space be considered finite because both have a roughly measurable beginning? Won’t they therefore always be finite, at least as far as our instance of the mutiverse is concerned?
Logically, no. Some things that were possible under conditions of the early universe are no longer possible. Some things that are now possible will be impossible in the future. So there isn’t an infinite amount of time for things to happen which require a universe approximately as dense as we now live in. And it may be that most of the things happenning, that we care about, are impossible except in a universe approximately as dense as we now live in.
If we live in a cyclic universe, maybe. But we probably don’t live in a cyclic universe. And for everything to be inevitable, there would have to be no arrow of time in which the nature of the cylcles move in a direction.
So, all in all, your hypothesis sounds unlikely.
The answer is…maybe. It can be said that conditions that existed at the start of the universe allow for things that cannot happen at this time, but who is to say that those conditions may not come into being for some as yet unknown reason in the far future?
(bolding mine)
Given that qualification, maybe it can.
Not necessarily; events might “clump” – fractally self-resembling schema – so that certain things happen over and over and over, while other events, while conceivably possible, simply don’t occur. Once you get way, way out at the ends of the bell curve, certain events might get overlooked entirely.
Even in infinity, there probably isn’t a world where Pee Wee Herman rules the solar system.
In infinity no word is more useless than “probably”.
I liked the way you answered this. It makes good sense.
Well, a beginning doesn’t necessitate an end, and so time could be “half-infinite.” Sort of like positive numbers. There is a smallest positive number, 1, but no greatest such number, and so, even with a beginning, they’re still infinite.
Scientific American had an article, some time back (probably obsolete by now!) on what the FAR future might look like in our cosmos. The acceleration of expansion suggests a very empty cosmos. Could that exist (if “existence” is even meaningful when there’s no one to observe it) forever?
As for distance, our own cosmos, derived from the Big Bang, is probably finite. The “expansionary phase” pushed the boundaries out so far as to make them unobtainable and unobservable. They’re gazillions of times beyond our reach. But probably not infinitely distant. The expansionary phase was probably temporary.
Are there other cosmoses? Might be. How far do they extend? Nobody can guess.
In practice, “infinity” never exists. Any time anybody constructs a really whopping big number, the mathematician shrugs and says, “Okay, raise 2 to that power.”
So, in any kind of meaning whatever, infinity is never attained. The universe cannot be infinite. (Nor can God.)
The Big Bang wasn’t a fiery explosion expanding into space, it filled all of space. And as I recall, if the universe is flat or hyperbolic, it was always infinite.
Imagine I flip a fair coin an infinite number of times. We would certainly expect to see both heads and tails many times (indeed an infinite number of times).
However, there is one infinitely long set that contains no heads: {Tails, Tails, Tails, …}.
Of course we can say the probability of seeing that result set is essentially zero. But then, so is the chance of seeing any particular infinite result set.
See Almost surely:
(bolding mine)
After having given this question a full two moments of thought now, I’ll go further and say that by definition that is exactly what will happen. Everything possible will happen subject to the inviolable laws of the universe, that is the only thing that can happen.
There’s absolutely no reason to believe this. It’s altogether possible that some things will never occur, even given infinite space and time.
As I understand it - and I’m a physicist who studied astronomy (albeit not necessarily a very good one) - in an infinitely large universe, everything that has a local probability of occurring of greater than zero will occur an infinite number of times. In a sense, infinite volume is more important than infinite time in this picture, and infinite time may stop making much of a difference if the universe suffers a heat death. But in another sense time and volume aren’t really separate issues anyway.
Max Tegmark of (I think) the University of Pennsylvania has published a fair amount on this. A few years ago one of his pleasantly accessible articles was published in Scientific American.
Actually, I think the OP is a question with a factual answer, though it is debatable whether it is a debate…
That’s because they don’t conform to the universe’s inviolable rules. That qualification simply makes the question “Will every inevitable thing happen?”, and it will. I think the OP probably intends some different question than my interpretation.
Disagree. Roll two six-sided dice an infinite number of times, and you’ll still see “7” more often than “2.”
It might help if you work with the concept of “probability density.” Even in an infinite universe, "7"s are six times as “dense” in representation then "2"s.
(Yes, you can put the two into a one-to-one correspondence…but only by a kind of selection that embodies a six-to-one distortion of the selection. You can also simply observe any large but finite subset of the infinite number of cases, and work from induction.)
I thought that since entropy is always increasing, as time goes on there’s less and less that you can “do” with the universe. Sort of like how given an infinite amount of time, a person couldn’t do everything that could possibly be done - (s)he’d die eventually, and then all the time in the world wouldn’t help things along.
Eh? Space has no measurable beginning other than “here.”
I like maybe, it leaves one a little ‘wiggle’ room. 