Re: poly: eschatology

 hanson@econ.berkeley.edu (Robin Hanson) writes:
>The theoretical attraction is for a very nearly critical mass
>universe. The key observation is that the mass density relative
>to critical density diverges with time. If this parameter is near
>one, then it must have been very very near one when the universe
>was orders of magnitude younger than it is now. And if it is now
>almost exactly one now, then it will be far from one when the
>universe is a few orders of magnitude older than now, and thus
>we are living at the unusual time when this parameter goes from
>being near one to being far from one. Theorists don't have any
>ideas I know of for this coincidence, so they'd rather it wasn't
>there.

 Barrow and Tipler mention on pages 494 and 500 of The Anthropic
Cosmological Principle a theory that all possible maximum sizes for
a closed universe are equally probable, implying that we should expect
omega to be infinitessimally close to one. (I don't know how this
theory handles the possibility of an open universe).

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