Related papers: The Fine-Tuning Argument
Two thought experiments are analyzed, revealing that the quantum state of the universe does not contain definitive evidence of the wavefunction collapse. The first thought experiment shows that unitary quantum evolution alone can account…
In quantum mechanics physical processes procede by two different mechanisms. John von Neumann enumerated them as 1, the "discontinuous ... arbitrary changes by measurement," and 2, continuous evolution via the Schroedinger Equation. That…
The fact that life has evolved in our universe constrains the laws of physics. The anthropic principle proposes that these constraints are sometimes very tight and can be used to explain in a sense the corresponding laws. Recently a…
This paper argues that the physics of condensed matter cannot be fully reduced to the supposedly fundamental quantum mechanical theory for all the atoms of which the system consists. In fact, there are many reasons to reject the idea that…
We consider the multiverse in the intrinsically quantum mechanical framework recently proposed in Refs. [1,2]. By requiring that the principles of quantum mechanics are universally valid and that physical predictions do not depend on the…
We define a universe as the contents of a spacetime box with comoving walls, large enough to contain essentially all phenomena that can be conceivably measured. The initial time is taken as the epoch when the lowest CMB modes undergo…
I review the basis and limitations of plausible inference in cosmology, in particular the limitation that it can only provide fundamentally true inferences when the hypotheses under consideration form a set that is exhaustive. They never…
The multiverse view in set theory, introduced and argued for in this article, is the view that there are many distinct concepts of set, each instantiated in a corresponding set-theoretic universe. The universe view, in contrast, asserts…
There is a deep cosmological mystery: although dependent on very different underlying physics, the timescales of structure formation, of galaxy cooling (both radiatively and against the CMB), and of vacuum domination do not differ by many…
There is a widespread assumption that the universe in general, and the Earth's biosphere in particular, is becoming more complex over time. This paper formulates this assumption as a macroscopic law, the law of increasing complexity, for a…
Faced by recent evidence for a flat universe dominated by dark energy, cosmologists grapple with deep cosmic enigmas such as the cosmological constant problem, extreme fine-tuning and the cosmic coincidence problem. The extent to which we…
The role of global topology in the dynamics of the Universe is poorly understood. Along with observational programmes for determining the topology of the Universe, some small theoretical steps have recently been made. Heuristic…
The discovery that the Universe is accelerating in its expansion has brought the basic concept of cosmic expansion into question. An analysis of the evolution of this concept suggests that the paradigm that was finally settled into prior to…
Our conventional understanding of space-time, as well as our notion of geometry, break down once we attempt to describe the very early stages of the evolution of our universe. The extreme physical conditions near the Big Bang necessitate an…
We propose an approach to explaining why naive large quantum fluctuations are not the right estimate for the cosmological constant. We argue that the universe is in a superposition of many vacua, in such a way that the resulting…
Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to…
The model of the Universe in this paper uses equations of the unperturbed Keplerian motion. They have been updated, complementied and generalized when the solution of these equations is the characteristic function of a random value from the…
It is commonly argued that an undesirable feature of a theoretical or phenomenological model is that salient observables are sensitive to values of parameters in the model. But in what sense is it undesirable to have such 'fine-tuning' of…
Many cosmological models assume or imply that the total size of the universe is very large, perhaps even infinite. Here we argue instead that the universe might be comparatively small, in fact not much larger than the currently observed…
The overwhelming majority of scientists still takes it for granted that classical mechanics (ClM) is nothing but a limiting case of quantum mechanics (QM). Although some physicists restrict this belief to a generalized QM as represented, e.…