Re: CHAT: What statement? abyss staring

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Apr 08 2001 - 00:43:50 MDT


At 11:02 AM 4/7/01 -0700, Spike wrote:

>By the same
>reasoning, it must recur an infinite number of times, so
>eventually one of the previous states must recur as well, since
>the total number of possibilities is finite.

This is the Poincare recurrence time. For a human being and local
environment, this has been estimated at 10^10^26. As Paul Davies remarks,
the metric used is irrelevant--seconds or age of the universe--since what's
another dozen zeroes between friends?

Damien Broderick



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