Hello and welcome to the inside of Boltzmann's Brain! My name is Chris and I am a student at UW-Madison studying Biochemistry. I am heavily involved in neuro-anatomy research in a lab on campus and science education through demonstrations, and I really enjoy sharing my experiences in these areas. After all, who doesn't like hearing about brains and flashy explosions?
First, a little explanation of my blog's title:
The Boltzmann Brain Paradox refers to the second law of thermodynamics: that entropy (disorder) in the universe will always increase. Ludwig Boltzmann noticed that in our universe, there is an unexpectedly high level of organization for this law to be true. Similarly, if our level of organization in the universe, which contains many self-aware entities, is the result of random chance and fluctuation in entropy, then it would be much more likely that the universe would be able to create single self-aware entities, since this would require much less organization. Based on this reasoning, for every organized universe we see, there should be numerous self-aware brains floating around in unorganized environments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann%27s_brain).
This was something that a friend of mine told me about recently and I found it really interesting. The concept is something that I enjoy pondering about, but it really has nothing to do with what I'm going to be writing about in this blog - other that the fact that I work in a neuro-anatomy lab where I dissect brains. (In fact, I spent 2 or 3 hours out of my Sunday afternoon dissecting around 15 brains or so... my eyes hurt.)
In the future, I will write all about the fun things that I'm doing in the lab that I work in, as well as the cool chemistry demonstrations that I help perform for elementary and middle school students around Madison to get them excited about science education. Until then, I'm going to go rest my brain for a while, and maybe feed my stomach too.
3 comments:
Here's the original Boltzmann's Brain article from the NYT. Very fascinating stuff!
http://tinyurl.com/2jm9b4
I found that concept very interesting. Be careful, it might throw you into an existential crisis.
I really like that concept too, and just trying to explain it in writing started to make my head hurt a little. But then I started playing videogames, and that helped me to stop thinking.
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