chrisnhowell

good point. I'll try but I'm not sure it will help me! Let me think and I shall post shortly.

I appreciate the response but my knowledge in the subject is too basic. I don't really understand the answers! Thank you

Thanks for the reply. I apologise if I'm simply being ignorant but what do you mean by 'pushing inside'? For radio/video I meant one-way from him to earth. Thanks.

Scenario: man in spaceship leaves earth at near light-speed and returns a year later. 1. Would he need to travel constantly away from earth or could he just orbit for the relative time difference to occur? 2. What would would we hear/see from earth if we were in radio/video contact with him? Thank you for any replies.

I am no mathematician and I clearly don't understand probability theory as is apparent by my original post. Does it not come down to the idea that it is 'possible' to throw a fair coin and it infinitely land on heads? As a side issue; our descriptions of time like eventually, in the end etc become meaningless in regard to infinity. 'Instantaneous' and 'eventually' mean the same thing.

Does this thought experiment posit that BETWEEN the monkeys the complete works of Shakespeare can be compiled from individual words they type? Or does it posit that ONE monkey, given infinite time, will produce an error-free complete works. If it is the first scenario I can see this happening and I could actually imagine it working with just a large number of monkeys and a long time. If it's the second scenario I have a problem. Not just that it is totally counter-intuitive or that infinite time is impossible to comprehend. I realise that monkeys and typewriters are (fun) devices used to help think about complex theories pertaining to probabilities and infinity etc but I do have some serious questions: Are the monkeys to be thought of as random letter generators? If the experiment was posed as this - An infinite amount of monkeys, given infinite time could produce exactly the same sequence of randomly generated letters as another monkey had produced ( the same amount of characters as the complete works of Shakespeare) - I can understand that although this would be highly unlikely with a billion monkeys and a billion years, it WILL happen given infinity. This is random letter generators producing a random sequence. Shakespeare is not a random sequence. I would argue that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a random letter generator to produce a work of non-random generated language of that length even given infinity.I accept that I don't know where the cut off point in length would be. Why am I wrong? I assume that I am!