The PATH variable in UNIX and the Entropic Principle

"In a theory that gives rise to an eternally inflating multiverse, such as string theory [1,2], we must compute not what is typical, but what is typically observed. Cosmic horizons prevent observers from seeing all but a finite portion of the multiverse, near the vantage point at which they happen to find themselves. The likely properties of their local environment depend not only on the relative abundance of different properties in the landscape of vacua, but also on correlations between these properties (such as the amount of vacuum energy) and the local abundance of observers."

Taken from Raphael Bousso, The Entropic Landscape.

He is a Physics Professor at UC Berkeley, and a proponent of the Entropic Principle.

He says: Cosmic horizons prevent observers from seeing all but a finite portion of the multiverse, near the vantage point at which they happen to find themselves.

I have an Ubuntu 9.04 Linux distribution installation. With a .profile file like so:

# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
# This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
# exists.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples.
# the files are located in the bash-doc package.

# the default umask is set in /etc/profile
#umask 022

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    # include .bashrc if it exists
    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
    . "$HOME/.bashrc"
    fi
fi

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

What all this gobbledygook means is that my file system is huge, if I don't set some directions, with the PATH variable, at the beginning of my session, on how to go about searching for stuff, this PC will be glacially slow.

Do you see a connection?

Look for the next instalment of this topic.