A perspective on the landscape problem

Abstract

I discuss the historical roots of the landscape problem and propose criteria for its successful resolution. This provides a perspective to evaluate the possibility to solve it in several of the speculative cosmological scenarios under study including eternal inflation, cosmological natural selection and cyclic cosmologies.

Invited contribution for a special issue of Foundations of Physics titled: Forty Years Of String Theory: Reflecting On the Foundations. 31 pages, no figures

References in corpus (13)

• The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory
• Enhanced Non-Gaussianity from Excited Initial States
• Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity
• Reconstructing AdS/CFT
• Anthropic Distribution for Cosmological Constant and Primordial Density Perturbations
• A search for concentric circles in the 7-year WMAP temperature sky maps
• The status of cosmological natural selection
• On cosmic natural selection
• Scientific alternatives to the anthropic principle
• CCC-predicted low-variance circles in CMB sky and LCDM
• More on the low variance circles in CMB sky
• The significance of numerical coincidences in nature
• The weak anthropic principle and the landscape of string theory

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• The Black Hole Particle Accelerator as a Machine to make Baby Universes