The number of ways you could perturb the
universe
by changing just a single
particle for a single
moment of time.
If you pick a random particle at a random moment in
its
history and move it momentarily to another
randomly-selected position in space, you would have an
alternate universe
that is the same as our universe except for a single
perturbation.
Modeling the (expanding) universe as a
hypersphere whose diameter is increasing at the speed of light,
if the age of the universe in
Planck units is T,
then the 4-dimensional
volume of the universe in Planck
space-time units is (1/4 T) (4/3
pi T
3).
If the number of
particles in the
universe is P,
then the number of possible perturbatons involving
a single particle is 1/3
pi P T
4.
Using realistic values for P and T, P=10
97 and
T=8.78×10
60, the single-perturbation count comes
out to about 6.2×10
340.
The
factorial of the single-perturbation count is the number of possible alternate universes with the same
age, number of particles and
laws of physics as our own. That number is much larger,
about 10
10343.
From a
quantum mechanics point of view, viewed by an observer outside our universe, there are about
10
10343 overlapping
wavefunctions
inside our universe.
You can find a web page with more on this subject on
Google with the search phrase "mrob single perturbation universe".
Copyright © 2001-2002 Robert Munafo. Robert Munafo is mrob27.