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Boltzmann brain
The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a brain to spontaneously form in space, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did. Physicists use the Boltzmann brain thought experiment as a reductio ad absurdum argument for evaluating competing scientific theories.
Carroll believes that a better understanding of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics would show that some vacuum states have no dynamical evolution and cannot support nucleated brains, nor any other type of observer. [16] One caveat is that if the universe is a false vacuum that locally decays into a Minkowski or a Big Crunch-bound anti-de Sitter space in less than 20 billion years, then infinite Boltzmann nucleation is avoided. "Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant", Lisa Dyson, Matthew Kleban, and Leonard Susskind, Journal of High Energy Physics 0210 (2002) 011 ( at arXiv)"Is Our Universe Likely to Decay within 20 Billion Years?
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