this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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For something to be a possible universe vs an impossible universe, we would be talking about possible laws of physics that do and do not allow for a universe to exist.
That would be the constraints to an infinite set of possible universes.
The fact that there exist an infinity of fractions between one and two is irrelevant and has no bearing on this at all.
There are absolutely not an infinite number of things that could be excluded from the set of infinite possible universes.
Gravity, for example.
Last I checked, it was posited that a universe could possibly exist without the Weak Nuclear Force, but I have never heard of a possible universe that could exist without the Strong Nuclear Force or Electromagnetism.
It's an analogy to help people grasp that infinities are weird. Just like there are infinite numbers between 1 and 2, there are also infinite numbers that aren't between 1 and 2. Just because there's infinite universes doesn't mean one of them must have unicorns, in the same way that the infinite set between 1 and 2 doesn't contain 3. A common misconception people have is that infinite universes must mean there's one just like the Marvel universe, or that you win the lottery in one, but we can easily have infinity without including those things.
All of the universes could have our exact same laws of physics and that wouldn't prevent there from there being infinitely many. They could all have the same guy named Gary. The point is, you could have infinite universes just tweaking one variable infinitely many ways, and there are infinite variables....