Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: January 15, 2008

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction
in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article
are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field
of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real
past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly
star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you
think you see around you are illusions.

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of
calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and
discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in
the field believes that this is the way things really work,
however. And so there in the last couple of years there
has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers,
replete with references to such esoteric subjects as
reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of
spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions
of their cherished theories with their convictions that we
and the universe are real.

The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the
standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over
and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s
hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much
easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself
maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and
troubling example — a naked brain floating in space.
Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint
of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in
particular the brains — would appear far more frequently
than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might
be us.

Full article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?ref=science