A minor point though, I am sure you thought of that tho... it does not have to approach a point of stability, especially if there's a little error matching clocks. The influences can cycle, or form a strange attractor. But it would take some time for such differences to cause the worlds to diverge from each other. Perhaps first just the thermal noise would diverge, and then Brownian motion, and then where individual rain droplets form, and then it'll affect little eddies, bigger eddies, and so on, affecting the weather. Or random/spontaneous decisions by people might be affected by thermal noise at synaptic junctions. Ohh, also, shouldn't it be easier to create a perfect mirror sphere? If the field equations have a boundary where the field is set to zero, waves will reflect off it.

I think the point was that those small changes add up over time until one universe hits a stage where it simulates another exactly the same, down to the sub-atomic level, and then it's stable forever. Of course that doesn't exactly make sense, and Sam himself admits that this situation is impossible whether in reality or theory. Still a good story. Was the discussion on the story closed because you wanted it to stop, or just because it got too large? If it's the former, this page probably should be locked as well.

@Sysice I don't think there's any attractor that does that.

@Dmytry Don't forget, the movement of viruses in a fluid (e.g. air) is determined entirely by Brownian motion, as well.

@Sysice Actually, I guess discretizing it can maybe give surprising results like that... but I don't think that that would happen in this case. The most likely scenario is a stable loop.