English

Replacing Anthropy with entropy: Does it work?

High Energy Physics - Theory 2008-12-05 v1 Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Probably not, because there are lots of manifestly unanthropic ways of producing entropy. We demonstrate that the Causal Entropic Principle (CEP), as a replacement for the anthropic principle to explain the properties of the observed universe, suffers from many of the same problems of adopting myopic assumptions in order to predict that various fundamental parameters take approximately the observed values. In particular, we demonstrate that four mechanisms -- black hole production, black hole decay, phase transitions, and dark matter annihilations or decays -- will manifestly change the conclusions of the CEP to predict that we should live in a universe quite different than the one in which we find ourselves.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0812.1015,
  title  = {Replacing Anthropy with entropy: Does it work?},
  author = {Irit Maor and Thomas W. Kephart and Lawrence M. Krauss and Y. Jack Ng and Glenn D. Starkman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.1015},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

6 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:48:30.667Z