My new digital images for my book about Betelgeuse and Mintaka

Recently I made a few new images for my story about Betelgeuse and Mintaka, the Boltzmann Dragons. I would love to share these with you and hear your comments and criticisms about them.

I am not sure if I explained the Boltzmann Brain paradox (problem) before. This concept was one of the sources/inspiration for my story about the Shepherds of Seven from Orion and the two creatures that arrived by accident on Earth, Betelgeuse and Mintaka. They are kind of dragon like creatures, but only because my imagination created them so. They are particles, fluctuations, brain-accumulations of the knowledge of the billions of years old cosmos.
The Boltzamann Brain (Boltzmann Paradox) hypothesis/idea is named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) who advanced an idea that the known universe arose as a random fluctuation, similar to a process through which self-aware entities - Boltzmann brains - might arise. Such a self-aware entity may arise due only to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos.

From Wikipedia:

The concept arises from the need to explain why we observe such a large degree of organization in the universe. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in the universe will always increase. We may think of the most likely state of the universe as one of high entropy, closer to uniform and without order. So why is the observed entropy so low?

Boltzmann proposed that we and our observed low-entropy world are a random fluctuation in a higher-entropy universe. Even in a near-equilibrium state, there will be stochastic fluctuations in the level of entropy. The most common fluctuations will be relatively small, resulting in only small amounts of organization, while larger fluctuations and their resulting greater levels of organization will be comparatively more rare. Large fluctuations would be almost inconceivably rare, but this can be explained by the enormous size of the universe and by the idea that if we are the results of a fluctuation, there is a "selection bias": We observe this very unlikely universe because the unlikely conditions are necessary for us to be here, an expression of the anthropic principle.

This leads to the Boltzmann brain concept: If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just able to create a single self-aware entity. For every universe with the level of organization we see, there should be an enormous number of lone Boltzmann brains floating around in unorganized environments. This refutes the observer argument above: the organization I see is vastly more than what is required to explain my consciousness, and therefore it is highly unlikely that I am the result of a stochastic fluctuation.

The Boltzmann brains paradox is that it is more likely that a brain randomly forms out of the chaos with false memories of its life than that the universe around us would have billions of self-aware brains.

Don Page, a famous physicist, recently wrote this about the Boltzmann Problem:

"Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Giga years, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers per commoving volume by thermal or vacuum fluctuations (Boltzmann brains). If the number of ordinary observers per commoving volume is finite, this scenario seems to imply zero likelihood for us to be ordinary observers and minuscule likelihoods for our actual observations.”

If that is true, it would mean that you and me, you reading this and I writing this, are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than persons with a real past and possible future (if we are lucky or unlucky enough). My and your memories and the world we think we see around us are illusions.

“Hence, our observations suggest that this scenario is incorrect and that perhaps our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate.”

In other words it means our universe will die one day.

I hope I have given you some clues about the story I am writing about the two unusual creatures, Betelgeuse and Mintaka.


Here are some new images I made. I hope you will find them enjoyable and interesting.