Related papers: What's the trouble with anthropic reasoning?
The present discussion contribution is some remarks concerning and review of the proposal by one of us (C. Balazs) to explain the cosmological constant by a/the principle of entropy. Used without further comment this principle of entropy…
The cosmological constant Lambda affects cosmological gravitational lensing. Effects due to Lambda can be studied in the framework of the Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime. Two novel contributions, which can not be accounted for by a proper…
In cosmology, we would like to explain our observations and predict future observations from theories of the entire universe. Such cosmological theories make ontological assumptions of what entities exist and what their properties and…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
We trace the origin of the cosmological constant problem to the assumption that Newton's constant $G$ sets the scale for cosmology. And then we show that once this assumption is relaxed, the very same cosmic acceleration which has served to…
We attempt to dissolve the measurement problem using an anthropic principle which allows us to invoke rational observers. We argue that the key feature of such observers is that they are rational (we need not care whether they are…
[Abridged] Some cosmological theories propose that the observable universe is a small part of a much larger universe in which parameters describing the low-energy laws of physics vary from region to region. How can we reasonably assess a…
The matter content of the Universe is strongly inhomogeneous on small scales. Motivated by this fact, we consider a model of the Universe that has regularly spaced discrete masses, rather than a continuous fluid. The optical properties of…
The observed value of the cosmological constant poses large theoretical problems. We find that topology of the Universe provides a natural source for it. Restricting dynamically an Einstein-Cartan gravity to General Relativity in our…
After a short history of the $\Lambda$-term it is explained why the (effective) cosmological constant is expected to obtain contributions from short-distance-physics, corresponding to an energy scale of at least 100 GeV. The actual tiny…
The concept of a random Lagrangian is proposed. It is considered as a basis for a new view of the old problems such as renormalization, nonzero vacuum energy and the anthropic principle. It gives rise to nontrivial consequences both in…
In a recent paper (Vigoureux et al. Int. J. Theor. Phys. 47:928, 2007) it has been suggested that the velocity of light and the expansion of the universe are two aspects of one single concept connecting space and time in the expanding…
The world view suggested by quantum cosmology is that inflating universes with all possible values of the fundamental constants are spontaneously created out of nothing. I explore the consequences of the assumption that we are a `typical'…
Problems with uniform probabilities on an infinite support show up in contemporary cosmology. This paper focuses on the context of inflation theory, where it complicates the assignment of a probability measure over pocket universes. The…
Motivated by the mounting evidence for dark energy, here we explore the consequences of a fundamental cosmological constant $\Lambda$ for our universe. We show that when the gravitational entropy of a pure DeSitter state ultimately wins…
I try to revive, and possibly reconcile, a debate started a few years ago, about the relative roles of a bare cosmological constant and of a vacuum energy, by taking the attitude to try to get the most from the physics now available as…
Weinberg et al. calculated the anthropic likelihood of the cosmological constant using a model assuming that the number of observers is proportional to the total mass of gravitationally collapsed objects, with mass greater than a certain…
I consider the relation of explanations for the observed data to testability in the following contexts: observational and experimental detection of dark matter; observational and experimental detection of dark energy or a cosmological…
We point out that the long-standing strong CP problem may be resolved by an anthropic argument. The key ideas are: (i) to allow explicit breaking(s) of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry which reduces the strong CP problem to the cosmological…
In a quest to explain the small value of the today's cosmological constant, following the approach introduced in [1], we show that the theoretical value of cosmological constant is consistent with its observational value. In more detail, we…