Related papers: Replacing Anthropy with entropy: Does it work?
The causal entropic principle has been proposed as a superior alternative to the anthropic principle for understanding the magnitude of the cosmological constant. In this approach, the probability to create observers is assumed to be…
Here we deconstruct, and then in a reasoned way reconstruct, the concept of "entropy of a system," paying particular attention to where the randomness may be coming from. We start with the core concept of entropy as a COUNT associated with…
The usage of the anthropic principle in modern cosmology is reviewed. It is argued that its recent use to explain the observedvalues of cosmological parameters as most probable values for an ensemble of universes, is not justified. However,…
The causal entropic principle aims to predict the unexpectedly small value of the cosmological constant Lambda using a weighting by entropy increase on causal diamonds. The original work assumed a purely isotropic and homogeneous cosmology.…
The Anthropic Principle has been with us since the 1970s. This Principle is advanced to account for the "fine tuning" of the 25 constants of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Were these constants very different, life could not exist.…
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…
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…
We propose an alternative anthropic probability for calculating the probabilities in eternal inflation. This anthropic probability follows naturally from the weak anthropic principle, and does not suffer the freak observer or the typicality…
The anthropic principle is an inevitable constraint on the space of possible theories. As such it is central to determining the limits of physics. In particular, we contend that what is ultimately possible in physics is determined by…
The anthropic principle implies that life can emerge and be sustained only in a narrow range of values of fundamental constants. Here we show that anthropic arguments can set powerful constraints on {\em transient} variations of the…
Current cosmological observations indicate a preference for a cosmological constant that is drastically smaller than what can be explained by conventional particle physics. The Causal Entropic Principle (Bousso, {\it et al}.) provides an…
We compute the expected value of the cosmological constant in our universe from the Causal Entropic Principle. Since observers must obey the laws of thermodynamics and causality, the principle asserts that physical parameters are most…
Entropy is a very useful concept from physics that tries to explain how a system behaves from a point of view of the thermodynamics. However, there are two ways to explain entropy, and it depends on if we are studying a microsystem or a…
Anthropic principle can help us to understand many properties of our world. However, for a long time this principle seemed too metaphysical and many scientists were ashamed to use it in their research. I describe here a justification of the…
A central question for causal inference is to decide whether a set of correlations fit a given causal structure. In general, this decision problem is computationally infeasible and hence several approaches have emerged that look for…
We revisit anthropic arguments purporting to explain the measured value of the cosmological constant. We argue that different ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
Information plays an important role in our understanding of the physical world. We hence propose an entropic measure of information for any physical theory that admits systems, states and measurements. In the quantum and classical world,…
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…
I show that the maximum entropy principle can be replaced by a more natural assumption, that there exists a phenomenological function of entropy consistent with the microscopic model. The requirement of existence provides then a unique…