Boltzmann Brains Bullshit

What the hell is 'science' coming to? I subscribe to the 'New Scientist' magazine. This is a weekly rag that contains a lot of interesting science articles as well as commentary. I really like that it comes weekly as it sort of feels like a 'Newsweek' for science.

However, it isn't like that all of the time. Some issues look more like 'The National Enquirer' than a supposedly sane and rational magazine. With great frequency it seems the editors pick some way out topic in cosmology or quantum physics and use it to create a cover story with outrageous proclamations in the headline.

Yet, nothing in the past can match the audacity of this weeks issue. This week they devoted the entire cover story to the 'problem' of Boltzmann Brains. I kid you not!

Now, you probably don't know what a Boltzmann Brain is, neither did I. Having read the article I now realize that neither do the cosmologists.

The logic I read from the article sounded something like this..in an infinite Universe, given an infinite set of possibilities, then it is possible that a pink unicorn will pop out of space time for a while. Eventually, if you wait long enough, there will be so many pink unicorns popping out of the quantum foam that the absurdity of their existence will put the fabric of the Universe at risk.

Oh, wait, I think I quoted that wrong. They didn't say Pink Unicorns. They said 'Boltzman Brains'; imaginary hypothetical brains that pop out of the quantum foam. Pardon me for getting that wrong. This is so much more a reasonable hypothesis.

To be quite honest, the cosmologists who are pursuing this kind of nonsense have way, way, way too much freaking time on their hands. Are there no greater problems in science that they feel they have to waste time, money, energy, and intellect worrying about the implications of hypothetical imaginary entities twenty billion years in the future??

Don't we have more pressing issues at hand? I can think of a pile of cosmological questions I am interested in learning more about, but imaginary entities springing forth from the quantum foam like some sort of Douglas Adams improbability drive is not high on my list of priorities.

One of the compelling reasons I have in making this post is because I want to make quite certain that I am the number one hit on the Internet for the phrase 'Boltzmann Brain Bullshit'.

Now, one might ask, am I a cosmologist? Do I have the necessary educational background to dismiss this concept outright? Yeah, I think I do. My background is called a bullshit detector and the nonsense peddled in this week's issue of 'New Scientist' doesn't merit serious consideration.

I find it interesting that this magazine arrived at a time when I was just finished reading the autobiography of Nicola Tesla. After having read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin a while back, and finding so many insights into the man, I was determined to read the story of Tesla in his *own words* before I read anything else at all.

I have been aware of this Tesla in the past, but all of the books I saw on him were relegated to the new age, UFO, and paranormal section of the library. If I ever did get around to reading about the man I figured I would prefer to start with something based upon well researched historical fact. And, I thought, how could you get any closer to the man than by reading his own words in his own autobiography?

After having read his autobiography I must admit, perhaps his works do belong on the paranormal section of the library.

Tesla's autobiography is bizarre. It is quite short, disjointed, rambling, egoistic, strange, and bizarre. You learn very little about his scientific accomplishments. It is a highly personal narrative in which he relates numerous anecdotes about his life. One ironic part is when, right near the end, he goes off on a rant against the ignorant masses who adopt paranormal beliefs. The reason this is so ironic is that his entire lifetime of experience comprises one paranormal event after another.

In his biography he confesses to a wide array of serious psychological disorders. He is highly obsessive compulsive, he suffers from synesthesia, has a photographic memory, and could visualize and work on the most complex concepts entirely in his mind to the point that he simply builds it perfectly once it has been fully tested in his own vision. He has visions, premonitions, and honestly argues, with great force, that his, and everyone else's life, is entirely the result of deterministic forces. He believes that everyone is an automaton but most don't realize it. He says this is because virtually all people are too stupid or inattentive to realize they are robots at all. Since he is himself so attuned to all of the forces of the Universe acting upon his being he becomes convinced of this fact.

After reading his biography my curiosity became highly aroused to find out just what really happened to this guy. Having read his autobiography I kind of figured the real story was that he invented AC, which was his one big claim to fame, and then spent the rest of his life on the fringes of insanity conjuring up light shows and spouting nonsense.

To find out more I picked up a very well respected biography of Tesla and started reading through it. I have only read a few chapters but I am already getting some strong impressions.

First of all, man was I wrong. He truly was a genius of staggering proportions. It is almost beyond belief how much this single man changed the world. Certainly as much, if not more, than Einstein ever did. The fact that he never received proper credit for most of his work and later on sunk into obscurity is a both a sad tale and a crime of history.

Where things get truly weird is that, in addition to the numerous well documented cases of successes that Tesla achieved, he added to this numerous outlandish claims.

His most important claims had to do with transmitting energy directly through the earth without wires across vast distances. This was one of the key goals of his Wardenclyffe project. One of his other major outlandish claims was that he had found a way to tap into the 'ether' or 'cosmic force' (what we now call the zero point energy field and/or quantum foam) to produce unlimited free energy. His second was that he had invented an aircraft that would, well let's not beat around the bush, operate in the fashion with which we generally attribute to UFOs.

On the one hand you might simply conclude that the guy was both a genius and slightly insane. Or, simply that he got some things right and other things horribly wrong. To make matters more confusing is that he performed numerous demonstrations of technologies providing a number of anecdotal reports suggesting that he had, in fact, achieved some of these results.

Now, here we are over a century past Tesla's prime and we have to live with magazines like 'New Scientist' publishing articles about 'Boltzman Brains' springing out of the quantum foam.

Now, give me a freaking break!? If scientists are going to talk seriously about such nonsense why not invest some of that time, energy, and intellect pursuing a more efficient means of energy production for our own little planet?

I don't really give a shit about Boltzmann Brains popping up out of the ether 20,000,000,000 years from now! I care a lot more about figuring out a way to produce energy for the planet in such a way that it elevates humanity as a whole while preserving the planet at the same time.

Maybe Tesla was full of crap, deluded, or simply lacked the kind of knowledge we have acquired in the past century since he floated his wacky ideas out there. I don't know for sure, I don't think anyone would really know other than Tesla himself and, last I checked, he's dead.

There has to be a serious effort to focus on clean low-cost energy production that can benefit mankind as a whole.

That's just my opinion of course. If you want to waste your time, energy, and intellect solving the Boltzmann Brain 'problem' then, yeah, go ahead and have fun.

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A small postscript. After this post went online I immediately became the number one hit on Google for the phrase 'Boltzman Brains Bullshit'. The number two hit for this phrase is a website titled "The Triumph of Bullshit' which collects articles, youtube videos, and numerous examples of rampant bullshit in our culture. I'm pretty sure this is going to be one of my new favorite sites on the Internet.