An Infinite Universe

Infinity is a pretty weird concept, to be honest. You can’t really have an infinite amount of anything (at least anything that’s real). Pi has an infinite number of shit digits after it, but math is an entirely man-made abstract concept… so that doesn’t count.

But maybe the entire universe itself is infinite? It might seem so… with our lonely little asses whirling around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy… which in turn is just one of 125 billion or so galaxies we think are in the universe. And when the number of stars is something with more than 20 zeros after it, it seems like it might as well be an infinite universe out there.

But even unimaginably huge is nowhere near infinity. An infinite universe is one that either extends forever in time or in space– or both. But what-ever-the-hell exactly does that mean?

An Infinite Amount of Space

A universe with an infinite amount of space in it seems like it wouldn’t really be that big of a deal. But exactly what would take up all that space? Lots and lots and lots of shit to be sure. Anything and everything imaginable would be taking up that space. Just like in the infinite series of digits in pi you can find any arbitrary long sequence of numbers any arbitrary amount of time, you could come up with any imaginable physical entity (a person, a planet, a galaxy) and eventually, somewhere in the universe, it would exist.

In fact, if the universe were truly infinite in space, then somewhere there is somebody almost exactly like me on a planet almost exactly like Earth probably writing some shit blog entry like I am now. Within an infinite space, eventually at some point, all possible physical configurations would exist.

Another similar view is one of the many theories behind the nature of quantum mechanics: the many-worlds interpretation.

Typical Quantum Bullshit

If you know even a little about quantum theory, you know a) it is some counter-intuitively mind-boggling crap, and b) an outcome to any quantum experiment is not deterministic; rather there is some distribution of probability for various outcomes occurring. Although good ‘ol Einstein disagreed when he said “God does not play dice”, the countless experiments seem to refute this idea.

The many-worlds interpretation basically states that instead of the quantum wave function of a system (that random probability of outcomes) collapsing into a single state when we measure it, there are actually universes where every possible outcome exist. In other words… for every possible quantum state of every system, there exists a separate universe with that outcome.

For the classic Schrödinger’s cat example, the cat does not exist in the superposition of being both alive and dead, but there are at least two universes: one in which the cat is alive, and one in which the cat is dead.

In this sense, there could be an infinite number of universes… all with different outcomes to various quantum events. Imagine– every decision you’ve ever made in your life… there would be an entirely separate universe in which you chose something differently.

All in theory of course.

Whatever

So is the universe infinite? No clue. But if it is, then there are certainly some very weird consequences about the nature of our reality. Who knows, maybe there are an infinite number of you in alternate universes… living out every possible life you could live.

Or maybe it’s all just bullshit.

by Brandon / May 22, 2008 / Posted in: Philosophy, Space

Prelude To Summer

If today is any indication of what the days of summer are going to be like, I’m in for a real treat. Walking out of my apartment this morning at 11:30, the weather was 80 degrees and sunny, with a light breeze.

To wrap it all up, the new bar in West Campus, Cuatros, was playing some very chill summer music… and then (in the most cliché way imaginable) two midriff-bearing and very cute girls run by listening to their iPods. It was like the beginning scene to some shitty summer movie… where an impossibly high number of interesting things happen in sync along the main character’s path for 5 minutes while nothing important occurs so the movie can have the intro credits roll.

Of course, this picturesque scene was rudely interrupted by my own annoyingly acute awareness that I have two finals left to take before I can even remotely pretend it’s really summer. The jarring context switch that was falling out of my day-dreaming state was the mental equivalent of getting sucker-punched in the dick.

Anyway… I’ve got a final in 1.33333333 hours and I’m camped out in an abandoned classroom getting in some last-minute cram time whilst longingly looking out the window at the multi-million-dollar Gregory pool complex. Time to get back to studying…

by Brandon / May 8, 2008 / Posted in: College

Rejoining Humanity

As this semester is (finally) drawing to a close, I’m anxiously awaiting to rejoin the ranks of humanity any day now. I’ve developed the bad habit lately of completely and utterly throwing any resemblance of a regular biological cycle out the window… and it’s definitely caught up to me.

My sleep schedule will slosh around throughout the week… stretching inevitably towards an unbelievably out-of-phase cycle that might more closely resemble somebody’s day in China than it would a person’s in Austin. Even for a college engineering student, the last glowing digits I see from my alarm clock as I finally get to sleep mockingly remind me how screwed up my circadian rhythms are.

I also eat like shit the majority of the time… and I feel this is largely due to my impressively unpredictable schedule. When you get hungry at 5:30 AM, 90% of the time you’ll end up eating something that exchanges nutritional value for taste and/or ease of preparation. Some days, I’ll realize rather indifferently that I haven’t eaten anything all day, and then proceed to superficially satiate my hunger with some less-than-healthy meal, or half-assedly eat a small snack only to perpetuate my permafucked eating schedule for a few more hours.

My regularly scheduled workout routine from last semester has all been for not… as my infrequent and irregular visits to the gym serve only to unabashedly remind me that I am a fatass.

Yes… I have a shit ton of work to do. Yes, this is the most work I’ve ever had to do for school… ever. But there really isn’t any real reason as to why everything in my life has to been so shitty.

Regardless of the reason, I can only hope that the summer will bring change. Working a 9-to-5 will help regulate my sleep schedule, and unless I want to emerge at the end of August as a fat, pale, all-too-true-to-an-engineer’s-stereotype BITCH… then my fat ass will get in gear at the gym and the pool. With nothing to do besides work, I have no excuse to stand idle and let my life continue to be a chaotic mess of tangled biological absurdities.

The summer (and change) cannot come soon enough.

by Brandon / May 7, 2008 / Posted in: College, Observations

And Then There Were…

Gearing up for finals, I knew I had four.

Four three-hour slots that would be spent hating my life and wishing I had learned more during the semester, as well as hours and hours of studying and cramming at the last minute… times four. Four finals sounds pretty bad.

My VHDL design class has a policy for exempting the final… but I just narrowly missed the requirements. My test average had to be a B or above (check), I had to be making a B or above in the class with all 3 tests averaged in (check), and had to make a B or better on all the tests (whoops… damn you test #2).

So I played the numbers game of making an Excel spreadsheet that let me plug in numbers for my final to see what my semester grade would be. With my average being what it was, and the final only counting 25%, I would make a B in the class if I made anywhere between a 68 and a 100. GREAT.

Anybody in college has experienced the phenomenon of selectively throttling their effort on the final. Basically… the probability of the last test raising your grade a letter should entirely determine the amount of effort you should put into studying. The situation in my VHDL class is a perfect example… when a C on the final will get me the same final grade as a perfect score would… why study my ass off?

I was continuing to dick around in Excel when I got an email from the professor revising the final exemption policy… and it was like music to my ears.

“You are eligible to skip finals if test average is 80 and no more than one test less than 80%.”

SWEET.

And then there were three.

by Brandon / May 4, 2008 / Posted in: College

Red Bull Gives Me Wings!

Unlike the care free celebrations, exciting festivities, and home-room parties of elementary school, the end of the semester in college only brings a suffocatingly large amount of work followed by an relentless battery of exams.

My status? Well, with ¾ of a Red Bull making its way through my guts, I’m continuing to charge ahead into the uncharted territories of compiler code generation and processor pipelining simulation (2 of my 3 final projects). For the last few days, all I have been able to see has been a sea of C-code, expanding before me like a vast and endless ocean of line after line of absolutely unintelligible shit like:

int GetPointerSize (SYMBOL s)
{
   /*
   ** let's hope none of these are null...
   ** or we are completely FUCKED
   */
    return s->datatype->datatype->datatype->size;
}

It’s so hard to even care at this point… with the enticing allure of care-free summer days creeping into my mind, the last week of school seems to be waging a losing battle for my attention.

However, if given a small enough time frame, almost anything can have the appearance of being important. Right now, these projects are consuming my life, and are soon to be followed by four mind-blowingly difficult finals, but 5 years down the line… how much will all of this really matter?

Nevertheless, I’ve got shit to do.

And now that I’ve finished the Red Bull, it’s time to wrap up this post. If Red Bull really gave me wings, I’d fly away from my computer to an island where the only trees are things that grow out of the ground and the only risk for storage leaks comes from old rusty containers.

by Brandon / May 2, 2008 / Posted in: College, Computers and Programming

Life's Miscellaneous Et Ceteras

Brandon Valosek's reflections on life, philosophy, and programming