Even the Universe suffers from Writer’s Block

Probability is permitted because the universe gets lazy sometimes.

Probability is a necessary consequence of a universe that occasionally grows lazy.

Granville D. Austin

Our universe is not infinitely creative.

Not every event that occurs in our universe is new. There is a certain degree of regularity that arises and exists across the cosmos. There are universal constants that govern nature – Avogadro’s number, Planck’s constant, etc. These numerical values are indications of a universe that tires of novelty and occasionally finds repose in repetition. This quality of the universe—the fact that events can recur—form the groundwork for all of probability.

If a sparrow were to alight at the eaves of my bedroom window one morning, what is the likelihood that it would visit me again tomorrow? An indefatigable sparrow who visits my window everyday would answer that the likelihood is “inevitable” (tweeted in beakspeak, of course). However, sparrows are not known to display a mammoth fidelity to bedroom windows, so this likelihood is variable.

The role of Statistics is to deal with this variability in the repetition of events when the universe gets lazy.

A possible corollary to this, is that in a perfectly ‘creative’ universe there is only one certainty: No event will ever repeat itself!

~ Granville D. Austin

Sources for Further Thinkering:

Poincaré Recurrence Theorem: The Physics of (after) Life

The physics of infinity – George F. R. Ellis, Krzysztof A. Meissner and Hermann Nicolai