Related papers: Possible Anthropic Support for a Decaying Universe…
Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Gigayears, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers…
Many cosmologists (myself included) have advocated volume weighting for the cosmological measure problem, weighting spatial hypersurfaces by their volume. However, this often leads to the Boltzmann brain problem, that almost all…
Linde in hep-th/0611043 shows that some (though not all) versions of the global (volume-weighted) description avoid the "Boltzmann brain" problem raised in hep-th/0610079 if the universe does not have a decay time less than 20 Gyr. Here I…
Observations that we are highly unlikely to be vacuum fluctuations suggest that our universe is decaying at a rate faster than the asymptotic volume growth rate, in order that there not be too many observers produced by vacuum fluctuations…
Recently it was found, in a broad class of models, that the dark energy density may change its sign during the evolution of the universe. This may lead to a global collapse of the universe within the time t_c ~ 10^{10}-10^{11} years. Our…
The measure problem of cosmology is how to assign normalized probabilities to observations in a universe so large that it may have many observations occurring at many different spacetime locations. I have previously shown how the Boltzmann…
A cosmological constant fits all current dark energy data, but requires two extreme fine tunings, both of which are currently explained by anthropic arguments. Here we discuss anti-anthropic solutions to one of these problems: the cosmic…
In a broad class of dark energy models, the universe may collapse within a finite time t_c. Here we study a representative model of dark energy with a linear potential, V(\phi)=V_0(1+\alpha\phi). This model is the simplest doomsday model,…
A new expression to the total age of the Universe is derived in terms of the average deceleration parameter. This kinematic result holds regardless of the curvature of the universe as well as of the underlying gravity theory. It remains…
Although big bang cosmology effectively models even the most puzzling observational data, it offers no insight into why the cosmological expansion should occur at all. In this paper it is suggested that a finite Universe poses particular…
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…
The standard $\Lambda$CDM model provides an excellent fit to current cosmological observations but suffers from a potentially serious Boltzmann Brain problem. If the universe enters a de Sitter vacuum phase that is truly eternal, there will…
This thesis deals with the averaging problem in cosmology, which has gained considerable interest in recent years, and is concerned with correction terms (after averaging inhomogeneities) that appear in the Einstein equations when working…
Among the suggested solutions to the cosmological constant problem, we find the idea of a dynamic vacuum, with an energy density decaying with the universe expansion. We investigate the possibility of a variation in the gravitational…
It is attractive to suppose for several astrophysical reasons that the universe has close to the critical density in light (~30 eV) neutrinos which decay radiatively with a lifetime of ~10^{23} sec. In such a cosmology the universe is…
I explore the possibility that the cosmos is fundamentally an equilibrium system, and review the attractive features of such theories. Equilibrium cosmologies are commonly thought to fail due to the ``Boltzmann Brain'' problem. I show that…
An anthropic explanation for evident smallness of the value of the dark energy implies the existence of a time-dependent component of the scalar field, serving, together with a negative-valued cosmological constant, as one of two components…
Based upon a simple vacuum Lagrangian, comprising cosmological and quadratic scalar field terms, a cosmological model is presented whose history is indistinguishable from that of an innocuous low-density cold dark matter (CDM) universe, but…
Astrophysical observations provide a picture of the universe as a 4-dim homogeneous and isotropic flat space-time dominated by an unknown form of dark energy. To achieve such a cosmology one has to consider in the early universe an…
The measure problem of cosmology is how to obtain normalized probabilities of observations from the quantum state of the universe. This is particularly a problem when eternal inflation leads to a universe of unbounded size so that there are…