The probability that the universe only has finite space is not exactly 1, is it?
Much more might exist than our particular Hubble volume, no?
What probability do the, say, world’s top 100 physicists assign, on average, to the possibiliy that infinitely much matter exists?
And on what grounds?
To my understanding, the universe might be so large that everything that could be described with infinitely many characters actually exists. That kind of “TOE” actually passes the Ockham’s razor test excellently; if the universe is that large, then it could (in principle) be exhaustively described by a very simple and short computer program, namely one that produces a string consisting of all the integers in order of size: 110111001011101111000… ad infinitum, translated into any wide-spread language using practially any arbitrarily chosen system for translation. Name anything that could exist in any universe of countably infinite size, and it would be fully described, even at infinitely many places, in the string of characters that such a simple computer program would produce.
Why not assign a pretty large probability to the possibility that the universe is that large, since all other known theories about the size of the universe seem to have a harder time with Ockham’s razor?
The probability that the universe only has finite space is not exactly 1, is it? Much more might exist than our particular Hubble volume, no? What probability do the, say, world’s top 100 physicists assign, on average, to the possibiliy that infinitely much matter exists? And on what grounds?
To my understanding, the universe might be so large that everything that could be described with infinitely many characters actually exists. That kind of “TOE” actually passes the Ockham’s razor test excellently; if the universe is that large, then it could (in principle) be exhaustively described by a very simple and short computer program, namely one that produces a string consisting of all the integers in order of size: 110111001011101111000… ad infinitum, translated into any wide-spread language using practially any arbitrarily chosen system for translation. Name anything that could exist in any universe of countably infinite size, and it would be fully described, even at infinitely many places, in the string of characters that such a simple computer program would produce.
Why not assign a pretty large probability to the possibility that the universe is that large, since all other known theories about the size of the universe seem to have a harder time with Ockham’s razor?
“The probability that the universe only has finite space is not exactly 1, is it?”
Nooooo, that’s not it. The probability that the reachable space from a particular point within a certain time is finite is effectively one.
So it doesn’t matter how large the universe is—the aliens a few trillion ly away cannot have killed Bob.