Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0607227

From: Roberto Trotta [view email]

Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:31:46 GMT (15kb)

Why anthropic reasoning cannot predict Lambda

Authors: Glenn D. Starkman (Case Western Reserve University and Oxford U.), Roberto Trotta (Oxford University)

Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure

We revisit anthropic arguments purporting to explain the measured value of the cosmological constant. We argue that different ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an explicit example, we show that weighting different universes by the total number of possible observations leads to an extremely small probability for observing a value of Lambda equal to or greater than what we now measure. We conclude that anthropic reasoning within the framework of probability as frequency is ill-defined and that it cannot be used to explain the value of Lambda, nor, likely, any other physical parameters.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0607227