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<\/p>\nWhether it is a beloved childhood recollection or the simple knowledge of what you had for breakfast, our memories often seem like the only things we can be certain of.<\/p>\n
But, according to a group of leading physicists, all of your memories could merely be an illusion.<\/p>\n
According to this bold theory, all of your recollections are more likely to arise from random fluctuations in space than from real past events.<\/p>\n
That would mean everything you currently remember about your life and the world has no more bearing on reality than your wildest dreams and fantasies.<\/p>\n
Scientists and philosophers call this idea the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis, after the Austrian mathematician Ludwig Boltzmann.<\/p>\n
It is the idea that the most likely situation is that your brain, complete with all its memories, sprang into existence at this very moment out of random chaos.<\/p>\n
That might seem crazy; however, these scientists argue that it is an unfortunately unavoidable consequence of our most important laws of physics.<\/p>\n
In their paper, published in the journal Entropy, the scientists say: ‘At present, there is no fully rigorous argument that relies only on established physics to dispel the possibility of the BB [Boltzmann Brain] hypothesis.’<\/p>\n
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Our memories may be an illusion arising from random fluctuations in the universe, according to scientists (stock image)\u00a0<\/p>\n
To put it very simply, the idea behind the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis is that a random collection of particles can give rise to any possible structure given enough time.<\/p>\n
Those possible structures include the exact current state of your brain at this very moment, including all your memories, beliefs, thoughts and desires.<\/p>\n
Co-author Dr Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist from the Santa Fe Institute, told the Daily Mail: ‘Imagine in the distant future the universe has evolved into a homogeneous hot soup where things randomly fluctuate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Imagine that a fluctuation builds up, just by random chance, a brain like yours, with your present memories and your present perceptions, which nevertheless a moment later dissipates again in the soup.’<\/p>\n
In the infinite time of the distant future, its is quite likely that such a brain will occur so the question is whether you currently are such a brain.<\/p>\n
Intuitively, it seems that the odds of such a brain occurring are impossibly small compared to the chances of our brains and memories being real.<\/p>\n
However, a bizarre consequence of the laws of physics means that it is almost infinitely more likely that you are, in fact, a Boltzmann Brain.<\/p>\n
The problem is that this Boltzmann Brain hypothesis appears to come directly from something that almost all scientists agree is true.<\/p>\n
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A terrifying theory called the ‘Boltzmann Brain hypothesis’ suggests it is more likely that our brain popped into being from a random fluctuation in an otherwise empty universe than that our memories reflect reality (stock image)<\/p>\n
The second law of thermodynamics states that the total disorder, or ‘entropy’, of a system always increases over time \u2013 like a room that’s always getting messier over time.<\/p>\n
But, in order for our modern physics to work properly, this rule has to be ‘symmetrical’ with respect to time.<\/p>\n
That means, at any particular moment, the world was likely more disordered both in the future and the past.<\/p>\n
Lead author Professor David Wolpert, of the Santa Fe Institute, and his co\u2013authors explain: ‘In other words, the most probable situation, given the current observations, is that we happen to be precisely at a special point in the dynamics of the universe\u2019s entropy.<\/p>\n
‘In other words, the most probable situation is that we are just an entropy fluctuation, which is to say that we are a BB [Boltzmann Brain].’<\/p>\n
This has the strange implication that it is far more likely that our memories are false than genuine recollections of things that happened.<\/p>\n
However, the scientists argue that we shouldn’t be worried about such a hypothesis.<\/p>\n
Co-author Dr Jordan Scharnhorst told the Daily Mail: ‘Although we cannot prove that we are not Boltzmann Brains, we have no reason to believe that we are.’<\/p>\n
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Scientists say that the fact that our lives are an illusion, like in the sci\u2013fi classic The Matrix, arises from the laws of physics\u00a0<\/p>\n
In this sense, Dr Scharnhorst says that the Bolzmann Brain hypothesis is ‘unscientific’, meaning that it can’t be proved or disproved with any amount of evidence.<\/p>\n
‘At that point, it becomes like the simulation hypothesis – totally inconsequential speculation and not worth any anxiety,’ he adds.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In their paper, the researchers analyse the component parts of the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis with tools from the study of probability and randomness.<\/p>\n
What these results show is that the only confidence we could have that we are not Boltzmann Brains comes from the confidence we have in the Big Bang theory.<\/p>\n
Dr Rovelli says: ‘Dr Roveli says: ‘Generally we tend to assume that our memories are reliable: they are not random fluctuations in our brain. To ground this assumption, we have to assume something about the entropy in the past.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If the Universe has a definitive start point with a fixed level of disorder, we can orient ourselves in time and show that we aren’t just a random fluctuation in chaos.<\/p>\n
Prior to the discovery of the Big Bang through the Cosmic Microwave Background<\/a>\u00a0in the 20th Century, the idea that our memories were false was just as certain as the second law of thermodynamics.<\/p>\n However, thanks to what we now know about the Big Bang, Dr Rovelli says ‘it is clear we are not Boltzmann brains.’<\/p>\n