Related papers: Anthropic prediction in a large toy landscape
This short communication advances the hypothesis that the observed fractal structure of large-scale distribution of galaxies is due to a geometrical effect, which arises when observational quantities relevant for the characterization of a…
We discuss probability distributions for the cosmological constant Lambda and the amplitude of primordial density fluctuations Q in models where they both are anthropic variables. With mild assumptions about the prior probabilities, the…
We review some basic flux vacua counting techniques and results, focusing on the distributions of properties over different regions of the landscape of string vacua and assessing the phenomenological implications. The topics we discuss…
Agent-based stochastic models for finite populations have recently received much attention in the game theory of evolutionary dynamics. Both the ultimate fixation and the pre-fixation transient behavior are important to a full understanding…
The anthropic principle is one of the possible explanations for the cosmological constant ($\Lambda$) problem. In previous studies, a dark halo mass threshold comparable with our Galaxy must be assumed in galaxy formation to get a…
One way that an anthropic selection mechanism may be manifest in a physical theory involves multiple domains in the universe with different values of the physical parameters. If this mechanism is to be relevant for understanding the small…
Understanding the time evolution of fragmented animal populations and their habitats, connected by migration, is a problem of both theoretical and practical interest. This paper presents a method for calculating the time evolution of the…
Landscape cosmology posits the existence of a convoluted, multidimensional, scalar potential -- the "landscape" -- with vast numbers of metastable minima. Random matrices and random functions in many dimensions provide toy models of the…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…
Weinberg et al. calculated the anthropic likelihood of the cosmological constant using a model assuming that the number of observers is proportional to the total mass of gravitationally collapsed objects, with mass greater than a certain…
In the absence of a fundamental theory that precisely predicts values for observable parameters, anthropic reasoning attempts to constrain probability distributions over those parameters in order to facilitate the extraction of testable…
I examine some non-anthropic approaches to the string landscape. These approaches are based on finding the initial conditions of the universe using the wavefunction of the multiverse to select the most probable vacuum out of this landscape.…
The existence of multiple regions of space beyond the observable Universe (within the so-called "multiverse") where the vacuum energy density takes different values, has been postulated as an explanation for the low non-zero value observed…
Inflationary cosmology leads to the picture of a "multiverse," involving an infinite number of (spatially infinite) post-inflationary thermalized regions, called pocket universes. In the context of theories with many vacua, such as the…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances…
The evolutionary dynamics of molecular populations are strongly dependent on the structure of genotype spaces. The map between genotype and phenotype determines how easily genotype spaces can be navigated and the accessibility of…
In the context of models where the dark energy density $\rD$ is a random variable, anthropic selection effects may explain both the "old" cosmological constant problem and the "time coincidence". We argue that this type of solution to both…
When the number of events associated with a signal process is estimated in particle physics, it is common practice to extrapolate background distributions from control regions to a predefined signal window. This allows accurate estimation…
This paper presents an analysis of the smoothness problem in cosmology by focussing on the ambiguities originated in the simplifying hypotheses aimed at observationally verifying if the large-scale distribution of galaxies is homogeneous,…