Alan Dix, Lancaster University [ my comments on Gott's Grim Reckoning || synopsis of GGR || anthropic principle || related links ]

by J. Richard Gott III
New Scientist, 15 Nov. 1997, pp 36-39

Letter published in New Scientist, 6 Dec. 1997, p 54

J. Richard Gott III paints a worrying picture for the future of humanity, a mere 8 million years to go. However, the future may be even more bleak than his article suggests. His article could not have been published at any stage within the 200,000 years of homo sapiens' existence, as it requires a certain level of statistical and probabilistic reasoning which is only around 100 years old. Gott's random visit is not simply during the duration of humanity, but during the duration of probability theory. Using his calculations, this means the future for probability as a discipline has only somewhere between 2.5 years and 3900 years to go. The prudent statistician ought to learn a different trade before the year 2000. Furthermore, it is hard to imagine a technological society without statistics, so technological collapse is inevitable before the end of the 6th millennium.

There is some light on the horizon. Gott's reasoning depends on a random visit within the duration of a phenomenon. However, unlike Gott's visit to the Berlin Wall, which we can assume was independent of subsequent political events, there is an intimate link between the phenomenon of human history and Gott's mathematical observations about it[a reflexive phenomena , rather like the anthropic cosmological principle]. Assuming Nature's referees have done their job well, Gott's 1993 paper is the first published recognition of a Copernican principle of events. It is therefore not a random point within the lifetime of homo sapiens but the first of a particular kind of event within that lifetime. In this case it is like predicting the longevity of a marriage, not from a random visit, but from the time between the ceremony and the first argument. Happily, more than 2.5% of marriages last far longer than 39 arguments [but one lasted only 3 causeless blows].

I have produced a synopisis of Gott's article, or, if you have an appropriate New Scietist subscription, you can read the full article in the New Scientist archive.

Alan Dix
Lancaster University
alan@hiraeth.com
alan@hcibook.com