Log in Free trial  An Infinite Possibility of Uncovering
Metaphorical Monkey Business  Article excerpt  Were monkeys
forever to tinker on typewriters, they would - it is casually
said - eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare. But
this overlooks the possibility that, in their eternal typing,
they could continually miss the bard's particular wordy ways.
Typing for an eternity offers no guarantee that everything which
could get typed does get typed.  Typing monkeys, bizarre though
it may seem, have become relevant to cosmology and to
cosmological speculations about the nature of time. Professor
Paul Davies, mathematician, physicist and this year's winner of
the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, writes in The Last
Three Minutes that, were the universe to have an infinite
lifetime, "any physical process, however slow or improbable,
would have to happen sometime" - including the aforementioned
monkey business. If this is right and were the world temporally
infinite, interesting conclusions flow: