Now that’s something I never thought I would say.

According to a new theory by cosmologists, published in the New York Times, me and you might just be the momentary spasms of some brains floating in space.

Freaky, I know. Read this:

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

If you are a creationist, you will hate this. If you are an evolutionist, you will equally hate this. The “calculations” leading to the theory have not yet been proven correct, but scientists are still working on them.

You have to read the article more than three times to understand it fully. I read it once and a half so far. But just imagine, the idea of us being “notions” of things that happened in the past, and not being real people with real lives — that is fascinating!

The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Whoa!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.