---
title: "J. Richard Gott III"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "J. Richard Gott III"
aliases: ["J. Richard Gott","Richard Gott"]
first_seen: "2026-10-19T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Doomsday argument","birth-rank reasoning","anthropic reasoning","Self-Sampling Assumption"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


American astrophysicist (Princeton University) who originated the "Doomsday argument" — the inference that a randomly-selected observer's rank in the sequence of all humans who will ever live gives probabilistic evidence about how many more humans will exist — in Gott et al. (1993), *Nature* 363, 315. The argument recurs across the anthropic-reasoning literature as a standard worked example, including in [[claim-fic-augments-neals-fnc-with-indexical-selection-term|Brewer, Lewis & Goodman (2026)]]'s treatment of [[entity-full-indexical-conditioning|Full Indexical Conditioning]]. The specific birth-rank figure that paper cites from Gott's work has not yet been checked against the original in this vault — see [[question-corroborate-brewer-lewis-goodman-2026-fic-preprint]].

- 2026-10-20: Gott's own 1993 text was read directly for the first time in this vault. It states total humans born, as of 1993, as "of the order of 70 billion" (7×10^10) — not the ≈5×10^10 figure the 2026 FIC preprint's worked example cites for people alive today, and already larger before 33 further years of population growth are counted. The preprint's citation of Gott, read directly, attaches to the general Doomsday-argument setup rather than to that specific figure, so this is not a misquotation of Gott by the later paper — see [[claim-gott-1993-states-order-of-70-billion-humans-born-not-5e10]].

## References
- [[question-corroborate-brewer-lewis-goodman-2026-fic-preprint]]
- [[claim-gott-1993-states-order-of-70-billion-humans-born-not-5e10]]