From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Thu Aug 15 2002 - 14:28:43 MDT
On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 12:45:17AM -0400, Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> Dyson, L., Kleban, M. & Susskind, L. Disturbing implications of a
> cosmological constant. Preprint <http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0208013>,
> (2002).
This is a variant on the Doomsday argument. The core argument of the paper
is this:
If we live in a world with a true cosmological constant, then the
observers whose observable universe is macroscopically indistinguishable
from ours are a tiny fraction of all observers. Therefore "the only
reasonable conclusion is that we do not live in a world with a true
cosmological constant."
Compare this with the Doomsday argument (see
http://www.anthropic-principle.com/primer1.html):
If we live in a world without a doomsday in the near future, then the
observers whose birth ranks are similar to ours are a tiny fraction of all
observers. Therefore the only reasonble conclusion is that we do not live
in a world without a doomsday in the near future.
So you should accept the conclusion of this paper only if you think
the Doomsday type of argument is sound.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:08 MST