Related papers: Extending cosmological natural selection
For Lee Smolin, our universe is only one in a much larger cosmos (the Multiverse) - a member of a growing community of universes, each one being born in a bounce following the formation of a black hole. In the course of this, the values of…
If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported. This article considers whether similar fine-tuning of parameters applies to…
I make a number of comments about Smolin's theory of Cosmic Natural Selection.
Three observational tests of cosmological natural selection, a theory that follows from some hypotheses about quantum gravity, are described. If true, this theory explains the choices of the parameters of the standard model of particle…
The network of cosmological tests is tight enough now to show that the relativistic Big Bang cosmology is a good approximation to what happened as the universe expanded and cooled through light element production and evolved to the present.…
Evolution of a universe with homogeneous extra dimensions is studied with the benefit of a well-chosen parameter space that provides a systematic, useful, and convenient way for analysis. In this model we find a natural evolution pattern…
The problem of making predictions from theories that have landscapes of possible low energy parameters is reviewed. Conditions for such a theory to yield falsifiable predictions for doable experiments are given. It is shown that the…
The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…
In this paper we work out a multiverse scenario whose physical characteristics enable us to advance the following the conjecture that whereas the physics of particles and fields is confined to live in the realm of the whole multiverse…
The idea that the cosmological term, Lambda, should be a time dependent quantity in cosmology is a most natural one. It is difficult to conceive an expanding universe with a strictly constant vacuum energy density, namely one that has…
The expansion of the Universe is the basis of modern cosmology. This chapter outlines the theory behind the expansion of the universe, including the cosmological principle, distances, velocities, and accelerations. We provide basic…
The principles of General Relativity allow for a non-vanishing cosmological constant, which can possibly be interpreted at least partially in terms of quantum-fluctuations of matter fields. Depending on sign and magnitude it can cause…
In the {\em Many Worlds Interpretation} of quantum mechanics, the range of possible worlds (or histories) provides variation, and the Anthropic Principle is a selective principle analogous to natural selection. When looked on in this way,…
One way that an anthropic selection mechanism may be manifest in a physical theory involves multiple domains in the universe with different values of the physical parameters. If this mechanism is to be relevant for understanding the small…
The aim of this thesis is to question some of the basic assumptions that go into building the $\Lambda$CDM model of our universe. The assumptions we focus on are the initial conditions of the universe, the fundamental forces in the universe…
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…
Physics is facing contingency. Not only in facts but also in laws (the frontier becoming extremely narrow). Cosmic natural selection is a tantalizing idea to explain the apparently highly improbable structure of our Universe. In this brief…
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 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…
We develop a cosmological theory in which the evolution of the universe is controlled by the cosmological constant and dominated by the associated vacuum energy. The universe starts as a classical de Sitter space with an infinite effective…