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On https://www.livescience.com/17875-destroy-earth-doomsday.html, under total existential failure, it says that the earth could just wink out of existence. Assuming everything has an infinitesimal amount of uncertainty, could this happen?

Note: I think my tags are wrong, so I choses the closest one.

Mauro ALLEGRANZA
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Because I said it
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    What they mean by Earth's atoms "simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist" is likely not "wink out of existence" but spontaneously decay, which does have a very small but non-zero probability under the uncertainty principle. That is where those "greater than a googolplex to one" odds come from. We have much more to worry about from the impending [Andromeda–Milky Way collision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision) in about 6 billion years than from any of the fanciful scenarios in this paper. – Conifold Oct 04 '21 at 19:26
  • That's a physics question – armand Oct 05 '21 at 00:04

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Sure, it's possible. There are several ways it might happen.

  • Scenario 1: All the particles involved in the Earth suddenly quantum-tunnel somewhere far away. No more Earth. This is the possibility the article mentions. Incredibly unlikely under our current understanding of quantum physics, but possible.
  • Scenario 2: You are living in a simulation. Earth is part of the simulation. The aliens running the simulation get bored and delete it. Hard to quantify how likely or unlikely this might be, but as far as we know, possible.
  • Scenario 3: You are a Boltzmann brain or a brain-in-a-vat, or in some other way just deluded into thinking there is an Earth, when there is no Earth. Earth doesn't exactly disappear in this one, because it didn't exist to begin with. The chance of this scenario is hard to quantify, but might actually be very high; under the assumptions in the Boltzmann brain argument, under our current laws of physics, it seems that almost all brains should be Boltzmann brains.
  • Scenario 4: There is some as-yet-undiscovered law of physics that will result in the sudden disappearance of Earth without any warning. Hard to quantify how likely or unlikely this might be.
  • Scenario 5: Inductive inference is simply invalid. There is no justified reason to think Earth will continue tomorrow, just because it has existed for a long time. Tomorrow it blinks out. Why? You can't ask why, because all empirical explanations are invalid.
causative
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For the earth's atoms to simultaneously all wink out of existence at the same instant would break the laws of baryon conservation, energy conservation, angular momentum conservation, and linear momentum conservation. A universe where that is possible would be acausal and the probabilities of all possible outcomes in it would not add up to 1.

Such a universe wouldn't have us in it to observe it.

niels nielsen
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  • why the downvote? is my answer inaccurate? – niels nielsen Oct 05 '21 at 06:37
  • These laws aren’t sacred, they are based on observation and we know that spontaneous vanishing of a particle is extremely rare if it happens at all. While it’s a valid observation that particles obey certain rules during their ‘lives’ this doesn’t discount the possibility that these rules are not followed when a particle vanishes. This is not without precedent- every particle in the Universe has presumably come from somewhere and their creation does not fit in with the physics of the Universe as we currently observe it. – Frog Oct 06 '21 at 18:39
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    these laws might be "non-sacred" but only to non-physicists. Your other points are incorrect. Post this question on the physics stack exchange to learn why. – niels nielsen Oct 06 '21 at 23:45
  • I think it’s disingenuous to state without reasoning that my other points are incorrect. However I shall ask the question in physics and await the fallout… – Frog Oct 07 '21 at 07:46
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Current physics tells us that nothing happens without cause, even if we don’t fully understand what that cause is. For example, radioactive decay appears to be random, but with a large sample size it accurately follows a half-life and so there must be some underlying mechanism that we can’t see. Quantum physics tells us that an individual sub-atomic particle could vanish, but this is evidently quite rare. The likelihood of two nearby particles vanishing within a second (let’s say) is far less likely. And so yes there is a finite probability that all of Earth’s 10^50 atoms could disappear at once, but within the Universe’s predicted life of 10^20 seconds I won’t be holding my breath.

Frog
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    Current physics just tells us that quantum events have definite probabilities (which is enough to make the statistics of a large sample of events predictable with a high level of confidence, due the [law of large numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers) in statistics), but this isn't take to imply that the exact timing of each individual atom's decay must be due to "some underlying mechanism that we can't see" (that would be a [hidden variables interpretation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory) of quantum mechanics). – Hypnosifl Oct 04 '21 at 19:07
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    Quantum physics doesn't exactly say that "an individual sub-atomic particle could vanish," since it still obeys certain conservation laws, so perhaps this statement should be clarified. – Sandejo Oct 04 '21 at 23:27
  • @Hypnosifl I certainly am of the view that there is some underlying mechanism that we can't see. After all, all variables are hidden until they are revealed. – Frog Oct 05 '21 at 20:06
  • @Sandejo to clarify my understanding: a particle and its corresponding anti-particle can come into existence by quantum fluctuation and then vanish again as a pair. Whether or not this is how all the particles from which earth is built came into existence is unknown, but if it is then they could all annihilate, each together with its corresponding antiparticle, wherever that happens to be. This *may* explain the problems with other laws of physics that niels nielsen mentions if somehow the antiparticle had precisely the opposite energy, momentum and so on. – Frog Oct 05 '21 at 20:14
  • @Frog - But why must there be an underlying mechanism at all? Nature could contain some genuine randomness. And there is also the many-worlds interpretation, which is completely deterministic at the objective level, but which can be seen to contain a sort of subjective probability due to some notion of [branching identity](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-014-9352-8) (the MWI interpretation has other advantages like mathematical simplicity and ability to account for Bell inequality violations without violating the 'locality' of relativity). – Hypnosifl Oct 05 '21 at 22:31
  • @Hypnosifl - a hidden (or not yet known) mechanism would explain why the probability of radioactive decay, for example, is well defined in large sample sizes. I’d be inclined to invoke Occam’s razor and say that’s the simplest explanation I can think of, unless there’s a better suggestion. If decay were truly random then I wouldn’t expect and statistical correlation and the idea of radioactive half-life would be meaningless. – Frog Oct 06 '21 at 03:48
  • As I mentioned before, the law of large numbers would be adequate to explain why a genuinely random process that nevertheless had a well-defined probability would tend towards predictable statistics in large sample sizes--do you disagree? – Hypnosifl Oct 06 '21 at 04:13
  • @Hypnosifl yes I do disagree. The law of large numbers describes how observations converge towards a statistical probability with increasing sample size, for example die rolls converge on 3.5. However, if radioactive decay were truly random then it would not converge because there would be no numerical value for it to converge on. – Frog Oct 06 '21 at 10:10
  • When you say "truly random" do you mean something which doesn't even have a definite *probability*? If so, you aren't using "random" the same way philosophers discussing quantum mechanics use it. But in any case, whatever word you might prefer ('stochastic', say), do you think there is anything logically or metaphysically incoherent about the concept of a type of event which does have a definite fixed probability, but where there are no further variables or facts determining the outcomes on individual trials? Or would you agree we can at least talk about a possible world with such events? – Hypnosifl Oct 06 '21 at 17:37
  • @Hypnosifl I’m using random in the sense that there explicitly isn’t a definite probability, in other words not a random selection from a defined set but a random selection of something that isn’t a set. Given that we know about a number of physical laws that obey similar probabilistic rules and do have underlying mechanisms that weren’t understood at some point, Occam’s razor suggests that it’s reasonable to assume that radioactive decay is another one. You are right though that it would be rash to discount alternative explanations while the mechanism, if there is one, remains unknown. – Frog Oct 06 '21 at 18:34
  • As I said, this use of "random" is different from how everyone in science/philosophy of science uses it, so you should be aware of that, and you might want to explain how you use it differently in future conversations about QM. As for the precedent of previous stochastic theories that had underlying mechanisms, there are unique aspects of quantum mechanics (like the Pauli exclusion principle) that suggest that fundamental particles have no additional *measurable* variables associated with them that are yet to be discovered, which is why "hidden" vbls are imagined as unmeasurable in principle. – Hypnosifl Oct 06 '21 at 18:43
  • @Hypnosifl consider (a) the height of a human selected at random from the population of Nicaragua and (b) the magnitude of a number selected at random from the set of irrational numbers. Is there a problem with that? – Frog Oct 06 '21 at 20:22
  • A mathematician would say it's meaningless to talk about selecting a member of a set of numbers "at random" unless you specify a probability distribution (and the set must be [measurable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_(mathematics)) in the mathematical sense--note that the use of this term here is unrelated to my earlier comment about measurable vs. unmeasurable physical variables in QM) – Hypnosifl Oct 06 '21 at 20:34
  • Some mathematicians are at least talking about it https://math.stackexchange.com/q/2941916 and https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/q/33420 – Frog Oct 06 '21 at 22:07
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    Both of the answers to the first question say that you need a probability distribution, and the second question is asking how you "sample uniformly", i.e. assuming a [uniform probability distribution](https://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/statistics-definitions/uniform-distribution/). The person who asked the first question may not have understood that you need a probability distribution to answer the question meaningfully, but I'm pretty sure the OP there is not a mathematician, just an interested layman asking a question on the math stack exchange. – Hypnosifl Oct 06 '21 at 22:48