Jookia wrote:
danandlouie wrote:
well, i asked jesus, and jesus said it will be approx.one billion years when the temp gets so hot that the oceans will start to boil away and all sorts of crap happens. if humans haven't vacated the old homestead by then, well they can just kiss their butts good-bye.
Jesus is dead, your prediction is void.
He got better....
More seriously, reviewing the article tells me that these gentlemen, while probably quite brilliant physicists, know about as much probability theory as your average lottery player. It's a basic rule of probability that the number of observations has no bearing on the outcome of future trials; no matter how many times you flip that coin and get heads, the odds it'll come up heads next time are 50/50, because in the memorable phrasing of Larry Niven, "Lady Luck has no memory."
Even should Freeman Dyson's calculations (that the last proton will decay, and thus the universe will effectively end, in 10^10^40 years) prove inaccurate, and the universe should somehow continue into a true infinity, that will not in the least require that "every possible outcome" of every interaction
must occur. No breakdown of physics is implied.
Besides, their assumption that this must somehow cause time to suddenly end before their hypothesized "probability running out" scenario occurs smacks rather clearly of some sort of interventionist Editor belief - "It will never happen, because the Great Senior Professor will put a stop to it!" Pure philosophizing, bordering on religion, and having no place in a serious scientific paper.