Tuesday, June 07, 2005
See You In Infinity
John D. Barrow, a mathematics professor at the University of Cambridge, has written a playful book dealing with the consequences of infinity called The Infinite Book.
Barrow addresses and illustrates many of the mind-boggling and glorious possibilities of living in an infinite universe where everything that has a finite probability will happen merely by chance (without any supernatural meddling).
He uses the Shakespearean monkey paradox to flesh out his case. According to this paradox, a truly random and infinite universe will one day produce all the works of Shakespeare, as if created by a mob of monkeys hitting randomly the keys of a typewriter.
Barrow has ferreted out a web site simulating the simian effort called the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator. In the simulator, which launched in July 2003, time passes 86,400 times faster than real life and each monkey is assumed to press 1 typewriter key per second. In the beginning, there were 100 monkeys, and the increase in population is continuously updated. (The lifespan of a monkey is about 50 years.) As of today, the monkey record is a string of 25 keystrokes, which happen to match a line of text from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. After 2.65157 times 10 to the 49th power of monkey years, a monkey typed: "Barnardo. Who's there?
bP,Rx:E7x[)C5enduo0hdGWQelPy:gI..."
So who's out there? If the universe is truly infinite, then all of us, doing everything we've ever dreamed of, and everything we've feared the most.
Barrow addresses and illustrates many of the mind-boggling and glorious possibilities of living in an infinite universe where everything that has a finite probability will happen merely by chance (without any supernatural meddling).
He uses the Shakespearean monkey paradox to flesh out his case. According to this paradox, a truly random and infinite universe will one day produce all the works of Shakespeare, as if created by a mob of monkeys hitting randomly the keys of a typewriter.
Barrow has ferreted out a web site simulating the simian effort called the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator. In the simulator, which launched in July 2003, time passes 86,400 times faster than real life and each monkey is assumed to press 1 typewriter key per second. In the beginning, there were 100 monkeys, and the increase in population is continuously updated. (The lifespan of a monkey is about 50 years.) As of today, the monkey record is a string of 25 keystrokes, which happen to match a line of text from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. After 2.65157 times 10 to the 49th power of monkey years, a monkey typed: "Barnardo. Who's there?
bP,Rx:E7x[)C5enduo0hdGWQelPy:gI..."
So who's out there? If the universe is truly infinite, then all of us, doing everything we've ever dreamed of, and everything we've feared the most.
