Monday, August 15, 2011
PHYSICISTS: Do you believe the "infinite monkey theorem" to be true?
It is a theoretical concept. Infinite means infinite, not the number of particles in the universe, not the number of particles to the 100th power. Of course this cannot really happen, because nothing is infinite, not the expanse nor the time of the universe. Someone calculated that if the monkeys typed one letter per second, according to the probability of typing a single Shakespeare play, that the expected time is greater than the projected lifetime of the universe. But that is still a finite time. Over an infinite period, the monkeys would not only type all Shakespeare plays, but everything written with the alphabet, including en, Stephen King, John Grisham, along with all the possible typographic and spelling errors, as well as all possible alternate endings! Also all the possible translations into foreign languages using the same character set. Infinity is quite big, and this is a thought experiment to demonstrate that.
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