eli5: does adding infinite to any probability make all outcomes infinite?

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Using something as simple as a coin flip it’s a 50/50 chance that’s it’s either heads or tails if I throw the coin an infinite amount of times both heads and tails will be thrown an infinite amount of times just less infinite than the number of times the coin is thrown.

Let’s say as I throw the coin and a bird fly’s past and grabs the coin out the air the odds of that happening are low but because it’s possible would that automatically make that outcome infinite.

Could infinite also make the impossible, possible like if I throw the coin and try to work out the odds of it turning into a gold bar.

If the universe is infinite there could be a chemical that can teleport and turn the coin into a gold bar the odds would be astronomically low but still possible through the power of infinite or would this break the laws of physics or does the idea of infinite break the laws of physics.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

This is not really about infinity, just really large numbers.

The think about really large numbers is that they turn things that are so low probability that we normally don’t think of them as possible into things that become possible, probable or even likely or near certain.

If I asked you to pick 6 numbers between 1 and 49 and then proceeded to randomly draw 6 such numbers out of a bowl, the chances that you would have predicted the numbers I just drew are so low that we normally could simply say that it probably won’t happen.

However if you led millions people guess which 6 numbers out of 49 are drawn it becomes likely that at least one person will have guessed right.

This is how the lottery works.

Even if the result is unlikely, trying it often enough will eventually make it happen.

The tricky thing is that often enough can get very large.

Shuffling a deck of cards and randomly arriving at a particular order is so unlikely that you could repeatedly shuffle and check the cards and not get the result you were looking for before the sun becomes a red giant and destroys the Earth.

Or you might just get the correct order on the first try. that could happen it is just unlikely.

Our current understanding of physics mean that many things that we usually see as impossible are just extremely unlikely.

Your coin spontaneously transmuting into gold when you flip it into the air, is not going to happen, but not because there is no way for that to happen but because the ways it could happen are so unlikely that we can simply ignore them in any practical consideration.

The universe appears to contain a finite amount of matter and energy and is only a finite amount of time old, so there are many things that are so unlikely to happen that we can safely assume that they never have before.

There simply hasn’t been enough time and space yet to flip that many metaphorical coins.

However if the universe is not limited in time and will last long enough certain things that are normally impossible may happen.

If you somehow get infinite tries every possible outcome will happen eventually.

This leads to some very counterintuitive results. Like the famous infinite monkey on typewriters typing out Shakespear ‘s collected works including any lost plays. Or the less famous but more scary idea of a Boltzmann brain.

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