AnthonyC comments on Decoherence - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 April 2008 06:41AM

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Comment author: AnthonyC 06 April 2011 04:41:46PM 0 points [-]

In light of this, consider the cosmologist's claim that the total energy of the universe- rest-mass plus kinetic plus all the fields, especially gravitational, could very well turn out to be zero. Then your entropic formulation here could suggest a plausible answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and "Why did the entropy of the universe used to be so low?" If, initially there was nothing, it takes no information to specify the universe's state. Minimum entropy. The spontaneous introduction of particles (with no net energy change) represents an increase in entropy. The process by which that initial state would rise in entropy is still ongoing, just as a hot object takes finite time to reach equilibrium with it's surroundings. In the case of a star that process can take trillions of years.