The surprising upsides of living in a reality that repeats for eternity
Having faced the prospect that our minds are random fluctuations in a dead universe, quantum cosmologist Sean Carroll suggests that we may be stuck in an eternally repeating reality
Sean Carroll, a quantum cosmologist and philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, proposes a theory where our universe has past lives exactly like the current one. He argues that this idea could solve the Boltzmann brain problem, where self-aware brains with false memories could arise in eternal universes, outnumbering ordinary minds.
In his approach, quantum mechanics takes precedence over classical physics, and Carroll seeks to derive the observed world from quantum mechanics instead of starting with the universe we observe and trying to quantise it. One consequence of this theory is that the universe continually expands, contracts, and repeats in exact cycles.
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