Related papers: The Fine-Tuning Argument
The theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of…
In his treatise on light, written in about 1225, Robert Grosseteste describes a cosmological model in which the Universe is created in a big-bang like explosion and subsequent condensation. He postulates that the fundamental coupling of…
Valid ideas that physical reality is vastly larger than human perception of it, and that the perceived part may not be representative of the whole, exist on many levels and have a long history. After a brief general inventory of those ideas…
Can multiverse hypotheses ever receive empirical support? Critics argue that multiverse scenarios posit unobservable entities, face severe underdetermination, or fall outside the bounds of science. This chapter challenges that view by…
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…
In recent analyses of standard, single-universe, cosmology, it was pointed out that specific assumptions regarding the distribution and motion of matter must be made in order to set up the cosmological standard model with a global time…
The theory of regularity is a philosophical perspective in which laws of nature are just descriptions, that is to say, laws of nature do not govern the world. Moreover, according to the theory of regularity, the number of laws of nature…
It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI) states that the world we live in is just one among many parallel worlds. It is widely believed that because of this commitment to parallel worlds, the MWI violates common sense. Some…
A series of reasons to take quantum unitary evolution seriously and explain the projection of the state vector as unitary and not discontinuous are presented, including some from General Relativity. This leads to an interpretation of…
The oft-repeated claim that life is written into the laws of nature are examined and criticized. Arguments are given in favour of life spreading between near-neighbour planets in rocky impact ejecta (transpermia), but against panspermia,…
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…
Inaba recently used a simple model to suggest that Quantum Theory can result from a fluctuation in the cosmos. In this note we confirm this conclusion from a different and more general point of view. We then argue that this provides an…
The accelerating universe is closely related to today's version of the cosmological constant problem; fine-tuning and coincidence problems. We show how successfully the scalar-tensor theory, a rather rigid theoretical idea, provides us with…
I am most honoured to have the privilege to present the Foreword to this fascinating and wonderfully varied collection of contributions, concerning the nature of computation and of its deep connection with the operation of those basic laws,…
One signature of an expanding universe is the time-variation of the cosmological abundances of its different components. For example, a radiation-dominated universe inevitably gives way to a matter-dominated universe, and critical moments…
When one takes into account gravitation, the measurement of space and time cannot be carried out with infinite accuracy. When quantum mechanics is reformulated taking into account this lack of accuracy, the resolution of the measurement…
We present a framework in which well-defined predictions are obtained in an eternally inflating multiverse, based on the principles of quantum mechanics. We show that the entire multiverse is described purely from the viewpoint of a single…
In what has become a standard eternal inflation picture of the string landscape there are many problematic consequences and a difficulty defining probabilities for the occurrence of each type of universe. One feature in particular that…
The expansion of the observed universe appears to be accelerating. A simple explanation of this phenomenon is provided by the non-vanishing of the cosmological constant in the Einstein equations. Arguments are commonly presented to the…