Boltzmann brain

The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it is more probable for a brain to spontaneously form, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it did. Physicists use the Boltzmann brain thought experiment as a reductio ad absurdum argument for evaluating competing scientific theories. In contrast to brain in a vat thought experiments, which are about perception and thought, Boltzmann brains are used in cosmology to test our assumptions about thermodynamics and the development of the universe. Over a sufficiently long time, random fluctuations could cause particles to spontaneously form literally any structure of any degree of complexity, including a functioning human brain. The scenario initially involved only a single brain with false memories; however, physicist Sean M. Carroll pointed out that, in a fluctuating universe, the scenario works just as well at larger scales, like that of entire bodies or even galaxies. The idea is named after the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who published a hypothesis in 1896, prior to the Big Bang theory, that tried to account for the fact that the universe is not as chaotic as the budding field of thermodynamics seemed to predict. He offered several explanations, one of them being that the universe, even after it had progressed to its most likely spread-out and featureless state of thermal equilibrium, would spontaneously fluctuate to a more ordered (or low-entropy) state such as the universe in which we find ourselves. Boltzmann brains were first proposed as a reductio ad absurdum response to Boltzmann's explanation for the low-entropy state of our universe. The Boltzmann brain gained new relevance around 2002, when some cosmologists started to become concerned that, in many theories about the universe, human brains are vastly more likely to...