Related papers: What's the trouble with anthropic reasoning?
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like…
Behavioural economics provides labels for patterns in human economic behaviour. Probability weighting is one such label. It expresses a mismatch between probabilities used in a formal model of a decision (i.e. model parameters) and…
A number of problems in physics, mathematics, and philosophy involve observers in given situations which lead to debates about whether observer-specific information should affect the probability for some outcome or hypothesis. Our purpose…
It can be argued that the ordinary description of the reversible quantum process between two one-to-one correlated measurement outcomes is incomplete because, by not specifying the direction of causality, it allows causal structures that…
I review the role and meaning of the Anthropic Principle, particularly in its relevance to particle physics.
There is some evidence that the Universe is presently undergoing accelerating expansion. This has restored some credit to the scenarios with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. From the point of view of a theory of fundamental…
For a flat universe presently dominated by smooth energy, either cosmological constant (LCDM) or quintessence (QCDM), we calculate the asymptotic collapsed mass fraction as function of the present ratio of smooth energy to matter energy…
In this lecture I make some educated guesses, about the landscape of string theory vacua. Based on the recent work of a number of authors, it seems plausible that the lanscape is unimaginably large and diverse. Whether we like it or not,…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
Cosmology contributes a good deal to the investigation of variation of fundamental physical constants. High resolution data is available and allows for detailed analysis over cosmological distances and a multitude of methods were developed.…
By allowing for non zero vacuum expectation values for some of the fields that appear in the Hamiltonian constraint of canonical general relativity a time variable, with usual properties, can be identified; the constraint plays the role of…
An algorithm effects a causal representation of relations between features and labels in the human's perception. Such a representation might conflict with the human's prior belief. Explanations can direct the human's attention to the…
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…
The cosmological constant $\Lambda$ can be achieved as the result of entangled and statistically correlated minisuperspace cosmological states, built up by using a minimal choice of observable quantities, i.e. $\Omega_{m}$ and $\Omega_{k}$,…
The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
One often hears that the strong $CP$ problem is the one problem which cannot be solved by anthropic reasoning. We argue that this is not so. Due to nonperturbative dynamics, states with a different $CP$ violating paramenter $\theta$ acquire…
It is argued that selection criteria usually referred to as "anthropic conditions" for the existence of intelligent (typical) observers widely adopted in cosmology amount only to preconditions for primitive life. The existence of life does…
The Cosmic Defect theory has been confronted with four observational constraints: primordial nuclear species abundances emerging from the big bang nucleosynthesis; large scale structure formation in the universe; cosmic microwave background…
We consider a scalar field with a bottom-less potential, such as $g^3 \phi$, finding that cosmologies unavoidably end up with a crunch, late enough to be compatible with observations if $g \lesssim 1.2 H_0^{2/3} M_{\rm Pl}^{1/3}$. If…