Quantum monkeys
Articles
There’s a famous story, “Inflexible Logic,” by Russell Maloney, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1940 in which a wealthy dilettante hears the phrase that if you had enough monkeys typing then they would type the works of Shakespeare. Because he’s got a lot of money he assembles a team of monkeys and a professional trainer, and he has them start typing. At a cocktail party he has an argument with a Yale mathematician, who says that this is really implausible, because any calculation of the odds of this happening will show it will never happen. The gentleman invites the mathematician up to his estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, and he takes him to where the monkeys have just started to write out Tom Sawyer and Love’s Labour’s Lost. They’re doing it, without any single mistake. The mathematician is so upset that he kills all the monkeys. I’m not sure what the moral of this story is.
The image of monkeys typing on typewriters is quite old. I spent a fair amount of time this summer going over the Internet and talking with various experts around the world about the origins of this story. Some people ascribe it to Thomas Huxley in his debate with Bishop Wilberforce in 1858, after the appearance of The Origin of Species. From eyewitness reports of that debate it is clear that Wilberforce asked Huxley from which side of his family, his mother’s or his father’s, he was descended from an ape. Huxley said, “I would rather be descended from a humble ape than from a great gentleman who uses considerable intellectual gifts in the service of falsehood.” A woman in the audience fainted when he said that. They didn’t have R-rated movies back then.
Although Huxley made a stirring defense of Darwin’s theory of natural selection during this debate, and although he did refer to monkeys, apparently he did not talk about monkeys typing on typewriters, because for one thing typewriters as we know them had barely been invented in 1859. The erroneous attribution of the image of typing monkeys to Huxley seems to have arisen because Arthur Eddington, in 1928, speculated about monkeys typing all the books in the British Library. Subsequently, Sir James Jeans ascribed the typing monkeys to Huxley.
In fact, it seems to have been the French mathematician Emile Borel, who came up with the image of typing monkeys in 1907. Borel was the person who developed the modern mathematical theory of combinatorics. Borel imagined a million monkeys each typing ten characters a second at random. He pointed out that these monkeys could in fact produce all the books in all the richest libraries of the world. He then went on to dismiss probability of them doing so as infinitesimally small.
To see why the universe is full of complex structure, imagine that the monkeys are typing into a computer, rather than a typewriter. The computer, in turn, rather than just running Microsoft Word, interprets what the monkeys type as an instruction in some suitable computer language, like Java. Now, even though the monkeys are still typing gobbledygook, something remarkable happens. The computer starts to generate complex structures.