The de Sitter vacuum is not eternally stable. In fact the disagreement
between the Hubble parameter of expansion may point to the prospect the
vacuum is a phantom energy vacuum and the observable universe is heading
towards a big rip in a few trillion years. The dS vacuum may be even less
stable than thought.
LC
On Saturday, June 26, 2021 at 6:43:23 AM UTC-5 Tomas Pales wrote:
> Recently I've been thinking about why we live in a world with stable laws
> of physics, out of the plethora of all possible worlds. Why does the sun
> rise every day, why is the intensity of the Earth's gravitational field
> constant, why do causal relations ("the constant conjunction between causes
> and effects", as Hume put it) persist in time?
>
> While the anthropic principle might be used to explain why the laws have
> been stable in the past (because this stability is probably necessary for
> the evolution of living or conscious organisms such as humans), it doesn't
> seem to explain why we should expect that the laws will continue to be
> stable in the future. In fact, it may seem that such a stability is very
> unlikely because there are many ways our world could be in the future but
> only one way in which it would be a deterministic extension of the world it
> has been until now.
>
> But in the book Theory of Nothing by Russell Standish I have found an
> argument that seems to claim the *opposite *(if I understand it
> correctly): given the way our world has been until now, this world is
> more simple if its regularities (such as laws of physics) continue than if
> they are discontinued, and simple worlds are more likely (more frequent in
> the collection of all possible worlds) than more complex worlds. (A simpler
> property is instantiated in a greater number of possible worlds than a more
> complex property.) Such a deterministic world is fully defined by some
> initial conditions and laws of physics, while a world whose regularity is
> discontinued at some point would need an additional property that would
> define the discontinuation and thereby make the world more complex.
>
> Can it work like that? If so, I guess the probability that the laws remain
> stable is growing with the time that they have actually been stable. So
> now, after more than 13 billion years of stable laws of physics in our
> universe, is the probability that they remain stable overwhelmingly high
> (practically 100%)?
>
> Here is a link to the book:
> https://www.hpcoders.com.au/theory-of-nothing.pdf
> (the persistence of laws of physics is discussed in chapter 4, parts 4.1
> and 4.2)
>
>
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