Related papers: Multiverses and physical cosmology
Finetuning and Naturalness are extra-empirical theory assessments that reflect our expectation how scientific theories should provide an intuitive understanding about the foundations underlying the observed phenomena. Recently, the absence…
Revolutionary advances in both theory and technology have launched cosmology into its most exciting period of discovery yet. Unanticipated components of the universe have been identified, promising ideas for understanding the basic features…
The boundary conditions to be imposed on the quantum state of the whole multiverse could be such that the universes would be created in entangled pairs. Then, inter-universal entanglement would provide us with a vacuum energy for each…
Although cosmology is usually considered an observational science, where there is little or no space for experimentation, other approaches can (and have been) also considered. In particular, we can change rather drastically the above, more…
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum entanglement experiments is at best incomplete, since the intermediate state induced by collapse of the wave function apparently depends upon the inertial rest frame in which the experiment is…
Is the universe computable? If so, it may be much cheaper in terms of information requirements to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply basic concepts of Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible…
Quantum mechanics introduces the concept of probability at the fundamental level, yielding the measurement problem. On the other hand, recent progress in cosmology has led to the "multiverse" picture, in which our observed universe is only…
The contemporary physics has revealed growing evidences that the emergence can be applied to not only biology and condensed matter systems but also gravity and spacetime. We observe that noncommutative spacetime necessarily implies emergent…
Rich clusters of galaxies, the largest virialized systems known, provide a powerful tool for the study of cosmology. Some of the fundamental questions that can be addressed with clusters of galaxies include: how did galaxies and large-scale…
Cyclic cosmology, in which the universe will experience alternating periods of gravitational collapse and expansion, provides an interesting understanding of the early universe and is described as "The Phoenix Universe". In usual…
We consider ``brane-universes'', where matter is confined to four-dimensional hypersurfaces (three-branes) whereas one extra compact dimension is felt by gravity only. We show that the cosmology of such branes is definitely different from…
It is argued that all notions associated with the origin of life should be related with the participatory anthropic principle of Wheeler and must be extended into the realm of the multiverse. Also discussed is the notion that life can only…
The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics is studied from an unprecedented ontological perspective based on the reality of (semi-) deterministic parallel worlds in the interpretation. It is demonstrated that with thanks to…
Probabilities in the multiverse can be calculated by assuming that we are typical representatives in a given reference class. But is this class well defined? What should be included in the ensemble in which we are supposed to be typical?…
Recent work in set theory indicates that there are many different notions of 'set', each captured by a different collection of axioms, as proposed by J. Hamkins in [Ham11]. In this paper we strive to give one class theory that allows for a…
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…
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…
The modern Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics describes an emergent multiverse. The goal of this paper is to provide a perspicuous characterisation of how the multiverse emerges making use of a recent account of (weak) ontological…
Our knowledge about the universe has increased tremendously in the last three decades or so --- thanks to the progress in observations --- but our understanding has improved very little. There are several fundamental questions about our…
Modern fundamental physics poses new questions for philosophy, which, as it seems to us, have not yet received appropriate attention from philosophers of science. This paper formulates a number of such questions in order to present them to…