My point is that structure emerging out of noise, even if by mere coincidence, is still deeply interesting on a human, psychological level. Another commenter described the original paper as astrology, essentially arguing that it is bad science… maybe that is the case, but I think there is still room for some form of… confusion, estrangement, awe? in observing these sorts of phenomenon, even in scientific discourse every now and then. It’s vaguely like a piece of meaningless but none-the-less captivating art emerging out of the complex technological and discursive apparatuses of science.
I don't kno why ppl believe that it is. It's very big, we have no frame of reference bc it literally contains all possible known frames of reference and even with that in mind, we need a bigger thing to grasp how big it is, we won't ever have that perspective.
That doesn't make the universe infinite tho. Even if the universe is expanding at a rate greater than we could ever catch the other galaxies and this expansion limitlessly expands the universe, THAT is still not infinite.
There is no infinite thing bc nothing is infinite for real, it's an idea
Structure is still interesting.
In re: the non-causal alignment being even more astonishing - a simple argument to illustrate this is to ask- would you be more amazed if you threw 100 bouncy balls in a room, took a photo and they formed a perfect circle in mid air at that instant from that angle, or if you went and placed the marbles one by one in a perfect circle on the ground and took a photo?
The latter might be more meaningful, but the former is more miraculous - not in a religious sense of course, but just in the sense of the extraordinary unlikelihood of catching such a moment of chance alignment in noise, apophenic divinity, in how it seems to violate the second law, etc etc.
It might be instructive for you to try look up Piero Della Francesca’s method of generating perspective images from a point cloud (from the 14th century no less - he invented 3D face scanning then!) and try a few manual examples to really wrap your head around how difficult it would be for a perfect circle to emerge from a truly random point cloud.