Eternal Return

[Mister Agenda]

Maybe not
Why can't all universes (if others) all render under one set of physical laws.
I mean, prime numbers, real numbers, fractions, zero, infinity, etc don't change and that's what our maths is based on?
The periodic table of the elements are just elements with 1, 2, 3, etc  protons in them.

A bit like trying to work out the odds of life on other planets. Wildly unreliable with sample sets of one.

Because the chances of a second BB proceeding exactly like the first one are so unlikely as to be untenable. Suppose, for example, it produced no protons at all, or that the expansion was fractionally lesser or greater, or that the temperatures generated were lower.  We'd end up with a universe remarkably dissimilar to this one.

On a smaller scale, Stephen Jay Gould once outlined the history of life as-we-know it on Earth and came up with a dozen different scenarios wherein the tiniest changes would have led to everything from no humans to no life at all.  I imagine a re-do of the universe would be much the same. It's really only a matter of scale.

Boru

Not disagreeing, just commenting because you've given food for thought.

It is certainly unlikely that events will unfold exactly the same way after the BB, but it's possible that the physical properties of the universe are not unrestrained and can't be just anything. It may be that any universe that can exist would be pretty similar to ours, at least as far as the laws of physics go. Of course it may also be that they can vary wildly, but the vacuum fluctuation model of the origin of the universe suggests that at least the physical laws have to be such that the net energy of the universe will be practically zero, which would be a major constraint.

I agree that on the smaller scale, even a re-do that preserves physical properties would have different outcomes due to even tiny changes having a great long term impact.

I think the only way one could be identical to ours to the extent that all the people in our world are re-iterated would be if there were so many universes that duplication could happen by chance, but I can't imagine how many digits would have to be in the number of universes for that to be a probability.