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visarga t1_ja55tll wrote

Reply to comment by thecoffeejesus in People lack imagination and it’s really bothering me by thecoffeejesus

That's meaningless. Even enumerating all games of Go is tedious, 10^170, more than 10^80 the number of atoms in the universe, and that's only a small corner of "everything that can happen". If you put two go boards side by side the number of state multiplies between them.

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thecoffeejesus OP t1_ja5azdo wrote

Correct. Big numbers get bigger.

But if time is infinite, and matter isn’t, eventually all states of matter that can exist will, no matter how large that number is.

Think about it like this:

If you put an apple in a vacuum box, and let it sit there for infinite time, the apple will decay into nothingness.

But eventually, there will be a point in time when you can open the box, reach in, and grab an apple that’s exactly like the one you put in. Blemishes and everything.

It might be trillions and trillions of years from now, it might be tomorrow.

If nothing ever comes in or out of the box, the atoms that used to be the apple will cycle through every possible state, over and over, forever.

They will at some point in time be in every state they can possibly be.

If time is infinite and the box is inert, then there will be infinite points in time when you can open the box and find an apple that is in exactly the same state as the one that originally went inside the box. And every other kind of apple those atoms could make.

This is just a philosophical thought experiment, but it’s informing real world experiments.

People are working on figuring out if this is how our universe works or not.

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