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Thread: How an astrophysicist predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall

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    UK Avalon Founder Bill Ryan's Avatar
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    Default How an astrophysicist predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall

    This is about the work of astrophysicist Richard Gott, who realized that the Copernican Principle — that we're not observing the universe from any special or privileged position — could be used to predict anything at all.

    Below is the reasoning he applied to the longevity of the Berlin Wall. (He also predicted the longevity of the human race — really! — and a whole bunch of other things.)

    Because the Copernican Principle stated that in the absence of knowledge to the contrary, you should assume there's nothing special about your observational platform, you can also apply this to time.

    In other words, you can't assume you're in any special "place" on the timeline of existence of anything at all.

    Gott visited Berlin in 1969, eight years after the Berlin Wall was built. Based on the assumption that the wall would eventually come down, this was his logic:
    1. The wall's lifetime extends from 1961 until some indeterminate time in the future.
    2. I can divide that lifetime into two segments; the first 25% and the last 75%.
    3. Applying the Copernican Principle, I conclude that there's nothing special about the present time (1969). Therefore, I might as well assume that I'm visiting the wall at some random point within its lifetime.
    4. Therefore there's a 75% chance that, in 1969, we're somewhere within the last 75% of the wall's life. (Equivalently, there's a 75% chance that at least 25% of the wall's lifetime has already passed.)
    5. Since the wall is 8 years old, this means that there's a 75% chance that the wall's lifetime won't be longer than 8/0.25 = 32 years.
    6. Therefore, we conclude there's a 75% chance that the wall will no longer stand by the year 1993.
    The Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

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    Default Re: How an astrophysicist predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall

    Too bad Richard Gott didn't visit Berlin in 1962 or 1963. Then it would have been highly improbable that the wall would have survived until the end of the decade.

    I visited West Germany in 1969 and had some relatives in East Germany (Rostock) that I did not get to meet because of the difficulty of traveling beyond the wall. Who do I blame for the fact I didn't get to see them: Mr. Gott or all mathematicians???

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    Default Re: How an astrophysicist predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall

    I suspect most of us have heard of the 80/20 rule. (The "Pareto distribution" or the "Pareto principle".) Briefly, this "rule" posits that 80 of consequences come for 20 percent of causes. Also called the "vital few."

    This seems to be a variation of 80/20 rule, what we might call the "25/75 rule". Or, more accurately, the 80/20 rule is a variation of the 25/75 rule, which, it appears, preceded the Pareto principle.

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    Default Re: How an astrophysicist predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall

    Quote Posted by Kryztian (here)
    Too bad Richard Gott didn't visit Berlin in 1962 or 1963. Then it would have been highly improbable that the wall would have survived until the end of the decade.
    By the same token, it can be argued that a new car, just a few weeks old, is more likely to develop a fault than one that's been an old faithful for 10-15 years. (But maybe that's true... )

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    Default Re: How an astrophysicist predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall

    I was there before the Berlin wall fell.
    Funny how we had to show passports in the Uban, subway in Berlin in 1988.

    They say renewable, eco climate-smart for the environment, that's the way to go!
    and yet industry go on as nothing has changed, 2022 delivering cheap plastic's meant for one use only.



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    Default Re: How an astrophysicist predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall

    I think this principle is mathematically valid. This is related to the argument that since China has existed for thousands of years, it will probably exist for many many more years. You can apply the Copernican Principle to deduce it. The same cannot be said for the US, because it is much younger.

    I can argue in the same vein that humanity has 75% chance of ending in less than 30 years. Humanity has only a limited duration to survive (or stay human) since the crucial year 2012 of the Mayan prophecy. I am aware of the Copernican Principle today. There is nothing special today that made me aware of this principle. Today is 10 years since 2012, so there is 75% probability the end date for humanity is less than 3 X10=30 away. I predict with 3/4 confidence that humanity will end before 2022+30=2052. Interestingly, some prediction for the arrival of Niburu is around 2050.

    Humanity may have already self inflicted its demise by changing its DNA with the vaccines.
    Last edited by syrwong; 14th May 2022 at 19:07.

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    Default Re: How an astrophysicist predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall

    Quote Posted by syrwong (here)
    ***

    Humanity may have already self inflicted its demise by changing its DNA with the vaccines.
    Is humanity doing that, or inhumanity? I wonder.

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    Default Re: How an astrophysicist predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall

    Pardon me, this whole prediction business is utter garbage. The same bet might have been made in front of the Great Pyramid aged eight years, and lost to a thousand-to-one outsider. A thousand-to-one occurrences are happening all the time – once every thousand times, but strangely in the case of ancient pyramids much more often than that. Or before the Challenger shuttle eight seconds after takeoff. All this guy is doing is placing a safish bet. If you limit yourself to statistics, it amounts to seeing everything as being radioactive. Uranium has a half-life, reinforced concrete has a different half-life, and so does the Berlin Wall. Except that the Berlin Wall that collapsed was most of all a human concept. In human conceptual terms, most people survive a few generations, gods a few thousand years. Nothing lasts very long, so betting on an end-date is a little too easy, with no penalties for getting it wrong.

    If you want to talk only in terms of statistics, the possibility of anything happening is vanishingly small, all the more so with things of any complexity. Then you need to factor in the observer, namely you. You may be at no special time, but you are still a totally special observer. What makes you you is, multiplied by thousands of ova, the millions and millions of spermatozoa that came close, or not so close, to fertilizing the one ovum that turned up trumps. The ‘winner’ was not necessarily the fittest, the fastest, the brightest… it was the one that was best helped along. It may have been predetermined by some transcendent power, but definitely not by any active observer.

    If I am in such total ignorance as to to who you are who came into being, who am I to predict when you will cease to exist? We can all live to 120+, and we can all drop dead right now. If you look at this way, talk of massive global depopulation any time soon is total nonsense. Of course, all bets would be off if someone were interfering with the statistics, one way or the other.

    Statistics never told Schrödinger whether his cat was alive or dead. He relied on an active observer with a need to know to open the box. Except that he didn’t: the cat was always both alive and dead because it was never more than a thought experiment. Need is a useful gauge of something’s lifetime: if, say, it gets in the way, there is going to be a possibly urgent need to get it out of the way – built-in obsolescence if you like. Take the things most deliberately designed as obstructions: the Maginot Line and the Atlantic Wall survived only a matter of hours once this urgent need was addressed. The Berlin Wall lasted a little longer only because it was brought down peacefully.

    So what is missing in this purely statistical model? You have the theory of exceptions devised by Carl Jung with the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli, which they called synchronicity. Everything is exceptional – even in the middle of the curve, because there are so many other possibilities. As I see it, synchronicity is the glue between two or more seemingly random events, particles or whatever, which affects the randomness of pure statistics. The fall of the Berlin Wall is an egregious case in point: we know from Rome that the physical structure could easily have lasted two millennia. No individual actually did anything, yet certain circumstances ‘conspired’ so that an order was issued and received for the Brandenburg Gate or whatever to be left open for East and West Germans to circulate.


    Synchronicity is contagious, as evidenced in this selfsame instance by the fact that one open gate suddenly attracted large numbers such that the entire wall soon became one big open gate. When I say synchronicity is contagious, that means that is has the potential to become statistically significant although acting on an exceptional basis in contradiction to our current understanding of statistics. potentially turning into coordinated effort: many hands make light work. This is readily understandable in terms of mechanics. An object that is too heavy for one person to lift becomes relatively light when two or more are enlisted. Alternatively, one person can do the extra work by means of leverage, meaning a change of scale: less effort over a greater distance and/or time.

    Hence, if one considers both the building/maintenance and the destruction of the wall in these terms, clearly the comparative forces in presence led to its early demise. The great pyramid on the other hand was a human endeavour of such magnitude which had so little effect on subsequent human development as to be able to survive for centuries, apart from a few stones that were quarried. The Challenger rocket, on the other hand, was such shoddy workmanship that imminent disaster came as no surprise to some. So it would seem that, far from being a woowoo concept, synchronicity offers a much better explanation of what is going on than conventional statistics alone.


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