A chimpanzee randomly hitting keys has about a 5% chance of typing “bananas” in its lifetime, but producing Shakespeare is another matter entirely. Even 200,000 chimpanzees typing one key every second until the universe ends would almost certainly never reproduce Shakespeare’s complete works. The calculation shows how infinity can make an event mathematically certain even when it is effectively impossible within the physical limits of our universe. A monkey can type “bananas” by chance. Shakespeare is another matter entirely. Once the infinite time promised by a famous probability theorem disappears, random typing runs into the hard limits of the universe. The Infinite Monkey Theorem says a monkey pressing keys randomly for an infinite amount of time would eventually reproduce William Shakespeare’s complete works. The idea is mathematically sound, but a University of Technology Sydney analysis argues that its familiar conclusion becomes misleading in a finite universe. Associate Professor Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta examined what happens when both monkeys and time are limited. Their study replaces infinity with estimated real-world limits. “The Infinite Monkey Theorem …