The status of cosmological natural selection

Abstract

The problem of making predictions from theories that have landscapes of possible low energy parameters is reviewed. Conditions for such a theory to yield falsifiable predictions for doable experiments are given. It is shown that the hypothesis of cosmological natural selection satisfies these conditions, thus showing that it is possible to continue to do physics on a landscape without invoking the anthropic principle. In particular, this is true whether or not the ensemble of universes generated by black holes bouncing is a sub-ensemble of a larger ensemble that might be generated by a random process such as eternal inflation. A recent criticism of cosmological natural selection made by Vilenkin in hep-th/0610051 is discussed. It is shown to rely on assumptions about both the infrared and ultraviolet behavior of quantum gravity that are very unlikely to be true.

25 pages, no figures

References in corpus (6)

• Quantum gravity with a positive cosmological constant
• Is Our Universe Decaying at an Astronomical Rate?
• Generic predictions of quantum theories of gravity
• On cosmic natural selection
• Scientific alternatives to the anthropic principle
• The significance of numerical coincidences in nature

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Black Hole Final State Conspiracies
• The structure of covtree: searching for manifestly covariant causal set dynamics
• Possible Anthropic Support for a Decaying Universe: A Cosmic Doomsday Argument
• Extending cosmological natural selection
• Implications of the Reduction Principle for Cosmological Natural Selection
• A Natural Introduction to Fine-Tuning