The Cosmic Jackpot recently written by Paul Davies presents some new ideas, but also covers basic physics concepts. Today I highlight the probability that any one of us is here right now. Some writing, like me, others reading like you. My father did not die, until I was conceived, his father did not die until my father was conceived, and so on up to the beginning of life. Whatever big number you want to give to any of those probabilities, it is impressive that their product is not more close to zero than it is.
There is something odd about this. What comes to my mind is that probabilities have a different meaning when talking about the past than when talking about the future.
Nevertheless when thinking of the anthropic principle, it is hard for me not to feel odd.
Right now my position is that if I can predict something unknown based on the principle and it works, I shouldn't look a gift horse on the mouth.
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The goldilocks enigma is where the real predictive capabilities lie, but you're probably just talking about the anthropic landscape, right?
I finally finished the book. The comment in this note is just the beginning of other ideas about the book.
At this point I do not have any prediction. I am not sure if with the goldilocks mystery I can make predictions, nor with the anthropic landscape. But before I write more on this I want to clarify.
Anthropic landscape: Set of close conditions all leading to observers.
I could envision some study of those conditions and making a prediction.
Right now I am just digesting Davies' ideas.
One that I want to pursue is The Time Symmetric Quantum Mechanics, of Aharonov, Bergman, and Lebowitz, the way Davis uses it, to give teleology a better grounding. What I understood he means is the following:
The Universe is biofriendly because life makes the Universe biofriendly, in a similar way in which life keeps Earth's temperature at the right place for life, as James Lovelock claims.
The Universe is biofriendly because life makes the Universe biofriendly, in a similar way in which life keeps Earth's temperature at the right place for life, as James Lovelock claims.
Take note that it is no coincidence that Eddington also thought that the cosmological constant version of the general-relativistic field equation expressed the property that the universe was "self-gauging".
He was right, and that's the solution to the problem.
The cc is self-regulating... in other words... sorry.
I am not sure if with the goldilocks mystery I can make predictions
Yes, you can:
http://evolutionarydesign.blogspot.com/2007/02/goldilocks-enigma-again.html
Man, I hate it when they go silent on me.
The begged question was how the heck can the cc be self-regulating in a universe that is observed to be expanding at an accelerating rate... ?!
But noooooooo...
Island,
I am sorry. I am not used to people giving comments like you. I saw your site it is interesting.
I can give you a proto-idea on why the universe is self regulating.
If you assume that there is no connection to the exterior of the universe, whatever that means. Then the only practical solution I see is a two-way street.
As the great American thinker, John Archibald Wheeler put it. Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move.
At this point I do not have anything I can publish along these lines, but to me self-regulation seems to be the only way to go to explain an isolated region of spacetime.
As far as the acceleration is concerned I am still trying to grasp the consequences.
Hi Eduardo,
Don't worry, I know that I am a lot to take, and I have very strong feelings about this because no theorist has ever been able to refute what I am going to say, as it is quite obviously correct in context:
The universe that the original cosmological constant version of the general-relativistic field equation was applied to, was finite, but Einstein had no idea at that time that the quantum vacuum has real, massive, particle potential, and that is a critical little detail that would have served him well if he had known about it.
Let me illustrate this with a thought experiment so that you can see what happens:
1) Say we have a very strong sealed container that has an extremely good vacuum pump connected to it, and we turn it on to remove all of the pressure from the container, so that P=0.
2) Now, let's turn it on again and see what happens to the vacuum when we compress some of the remaining vapor pressure from the container, so that P (less than) 0.
hmmm... If somehow we condense or compress enough of this vacuum energy down over a finite enough region of space within the container, then we can attain the matter density over this region of space, and if there were no containing walls, then the vacuum would expand as negative pressure increases!
Please read this extremly short article that I posted on the physicist moderated research group and tell me what you think.
It is one of many similar articles that I have put before these quantum gravity theorists which makes the same point, and as I've said, none of them has ever tried to refute my point because they also recognize this as the very same mechanism that inflationary theories use to create mass at a great expense to negative pressure.
And there you have it... a self regulating cosmological constant, as well as hard proof that Einstein was not wrong.
Island,
I hope you don't mind. I posted your ideas in this blog. I will try to think through your arguments. At this point I cannot say anything half way interesting or to get a prediction that could be tested.
Hi Eduardo,
No, I don't mind at all.
I think that what this boils down to is that the negative energy solutions have been misinterpreted:
This is a "discussion" that I had about it which might help:
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2006-03/msg0073465.html
This articla from my blog further discusses this in greater detail including some good links:
http://evolutionarydesign.blogspot.com/2006/05/once-upon-spacetime.html
What it predicts, is quantum gravity to he/she who can write down the basis of wave functions in this background, including an expansion of the field in corresponding creation and annihilation operators - compute the stress-energy tensor in that background - quantitatively describe the vacua - and then work out the matrix elements of the stress-energy tensor between the vacuum and the one-particle states.
Somebody better than me, in other words.
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