RE: Is it ever physically possible for a broken egg to reassemble into an unbroken one?
June 9, 2020 at 12:42 am
(This post was last modified: June 9, 2020 at 12:43 am by Paleophyte.)
(June 8, 2020 at 9:26 am)polymath257 Wrote:(June 8, 2020 at 8:21 am)Little lunch Wrote: I'm standing there and an egg I just cracked accidentally reforms itself.
'Always a chance that could happen', I say to meself and carry on about me day.
In reality I'd say, 'well fuck me, god is real after all'. :-)
Yes, the issue then arises whether the probability of a supernatural outweighs the probability of the violation. When talking about odds this high, almost ANYTHING can go.
The problem is that the probability of a supernatural explanation isn't properly defined. If that probability is zero, which it likely is, then any probability no matter how vanishingly small outweighs it.
In practice, people tend to be exceptionally bad at properly examining the probability space. Probabilities lower than 1 in a googolplex happen every instant of our lives but we fail to recognize them because of the stochastic nature of the universe that we inhabit. In the instance of the egg the rational course of action is not to start worshipping Gawd AllMighty Mender Of The Yolk but rather to look for the Gallifreyan pankster who has been unscrambling your omelettes.
On a side note, googol and googolplex have always failed to impress me. They're stunt numbers based on the number of fingers on your hands. If really big numbers is all you want then 4^^4 is a bit better than 50% more digits than a googolplex and 9^^9 should be more than sufficient to tie up any computer from now until the end of time.
