Anthropics and Myopics: Conditional Probabilities and the Cosmological Constant

Abstract

We re-examine claims that anthropic arguments provide an explanation for the observed smallness of the cosmological constant, and argue that correlations between the cosmological constant value and the existence of life can be demonstrated only under restrictive assumptions. Causal effects are more subtle to uncover.

revised to PRL format, additional references and discussion to related work revised

References in corpus (7)

• Likely Values of the Cosmological Constant
• Holographic probabilities in eternal inflation
• Predicting the Cosmological Constant from the Causal Entropic Principle
• Life, The Universe, and Nothing: Life and Death in an Ever-Expanding Universe
• Are We Typical?
• Why anthropic reasoning cannot predict Lambda
• Black Holes, Mergers, and the Entropy Budget of the Universe

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Life at the Interface of Particle Physics and String Theory
• Technically natural dark energy from Lorentz breaking
• Observational Constraints on Dynamical Dark Energy Models
• Predictions of the causal entropic principle for environmental conditions of the universe
• Prediction and typicality in multiverse cosmology
• Drake Equation for the Multiverse: From the String Landscape to Complex Life
• Reheating-volume measure for random-walk inflation
• Blurring Out Cosmic Puzzles
• The Arrow Of Time In The Landscape
• Natural intelligence and anthropic reasoning
• Background dynamics and observational constraints of flat and non-flat $\Lambda (t)$CDM models from $H(z)$ and DESI DR2 BAO measurements