Black holes and up-tunneling suppress Boltzmann brains
arXiv:2105.00457 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.104.023528
Abstract
Eternally inflating universes lead to an infinite number of Boltzmann brains but also an infinite number of ordinary observers. If we use the scale factor measure to regularize these infinities, the ordinary observers dominate the Boltzmann brains if the vacuum decay rate of each vacuum is larger than its Boltzmann brain nucleation rate. Here we point out that nucleation of small black holes should be counted in the vacuum decay rate, and this rate is always larger than the Boltzmann brain rate, if the minimum Boltzmann brain mass is more than the Planck mass. We also discuss nucleation of small, rapidly inflating regions, which may also have a higher rate than Boltzmann brains. This process also affects the distribution of the different vacua in eternal inflation.
arXiv comment14 pages
References in corpus (31)
- From the Big Bang Theory to the Theory of a Stationary Universe
- Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant
- What does inflation really predict?
- Can the universe afford inflation?
- Black holes and the multiverse
- Boltzmann brains and the scale-factor cutoff measure of the multiverse
- Predicting the cosmological constant with the scale-factor cutoff measure
- Properties of the scale factor measure
- Making predictions in the multiverse
- Is Our Universe Likely to Decay within 20 Billion Years?
- Anthropic prediction for Lambda and the Q catastrophe
- Probabilities in the Bousso-Polchinski multiverse
- Density Perturbations and the Cosmological Constant from Inflationary Landscapes
- Lorentzian Condition in Quantum Gravity
- Eternal inflation predicts that time will end
- Decay of de Sitter vacua by thermal activation
- Watchers of the multiverse
- Evidence for a bound on the lifetime of de Sitter space
- Populating the Whole Landscape
- Geometric origin of coincidences and hierarchies in the landscape
- The string landscape and low energy supersymmetry
- Volume Weighted Measures of Eternal Inflation in the Bousso-Polchinski Landscape
- Anthropic prediction in a large toy landscape
- Non-singular bounce transitions in the multiverse
- Non-singular AdS-dS transitions in a landscape scenario
- Flyover vacuum decay
- Is there any coherent measure for eternal inflation?
- Eternal Inflation, Global Time Cutoff Measures, and a Probability Paradox
- Eternal Inflation in Swampy Landscapes
- de Sitter Bubbles and the Swampland
- Anomalous Observers in the Subjectively Identical Reference Class