Memories in the vacuum: are we living as Boltzmann Brains?
Physicists propose the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis: given enough time, random fluctuations could create a brain with all your memories, making our recollections potentially illusory. In a paper in Entropy, lead author David Wolpert and co-authors Carlo Rovelli and Jordan Scharnhorst argue this is a plausible consequence of physics, though there’s no rigorous way to prove or disprove it. They connect the idea to thermodynamics and argue that grounding our sense of time still rests on the Big Bang, concluding we shouldn’t panic, but the notion challenges the reliability of memory as a reflection of past reality.