I read the wikipedia article, but I just don’t get it…
In: 37
Given the opportunity, stuff in space will spread out, on average. With a large enough collection of stuff, over a large enough of time, everything will always* spread out and eventually there will be no usable energy left. If you drop a pile of legos on the ground, they will basically be a random pile that wants to be as close to the ground as possible.
Except, not exactly always. The key word here is randomness. Atoms sometimes, on a very small scale, do not obey this rule. Quantum fluctuations are also responsible for this, but very, very rarely, a bunch of atoms out in space can spontaneously clump up and create random stuff.
The Boltzmann brain is a hypothetical scenario/thought experiment in which these random fluctuations in space spontaneously create a brain. The odds of this are freakishly low, but according to our current understanding of physics, not impossible.
There are some hypotheses that the big bang could have been an even rarer fluctuation in which a lot of random matter decided to get into one spot at once.
This would be like you dumping a box of legos onto the ground and it perfectly falling to assemble a perfect 1:1000 scale model of the Burj Khalifa complete with functioning elevators.
Who knows, maybe you are a Boltzmann brain and all of your memories are the result of random fluctuations, and a second from now the brain will die because the fluctuations didn’t bother making lungs or a heart.
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