Word.ws English Dictionary

Carter catastrophe

Carter catastrophe proper noun: an early version of the doomsday argument.

Proper noun

Carter catastrophe

  1. An early version of the doomsday argument.
    • Carter chose not to publish on doomsday, discussing it only in seminars where he thought it could get a fair hearing. In this way the doomsday argument began as a secret, almost samizdat doctrine, known to a few as the “Carter catastrophe.”[2019, William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation that Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe, Little, Brown, →ISBN

Origin of Carter catastrophe

Proposed by Cambridge cosmologist Brandon Carter in 1983.

Questions about Carter catastrophe

What does Carter catastrophe mean?
Carter catastrophe means an early version of the doomsday argument.
What part of speech is Carter catastrophe?
Carter catastrophe is a proper noun.

Words near Carter catastrophe in the dictionary

  1. cartells
  2. cartels
  3. carteolol
  4. carter
  5. Carter Bar
  6. Carter catastrophe
  7. Carter County
  8. Carter Lake
  9. Carter Springs
  10. Carter-Penrose diagram
  11. Carter-Penrose diagrams

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Carter catastrophe (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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