11,646 research outputs found
The meaning of life in a developing universe
The evolution of life on Earth has produced an organism that is beginning to model and understand its own evolution and the possible future evolution of life in the universe. These models and associated evidence show that evolution on Earth has a trajectory. The scale over which living processes are organized cooperatively has increased progressively, as has its evolvability. Recent theoretical advances raise the possibility that this trajectory is itself part of a wider developmental process. According to these theories, the developmental process has been shaped by a larger evolutionary process that involves the reproduction of universes. This evolutionary process has tuned the key parameters of the universe to increase the likelihood that life will emerge and develop to produce outcomes that are successful in the larger process (e.g. a key outcome may be to produce life and intelligence that intentionally reproduces the universe and tunes the parameters of ‘offspring’ universes). Theory suggests that when life emerges on a planet, it moves along this trajectory of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if organisms emerge that decide to advance the evolutionary process intentionally. The organisms must be prepared to make this commitment even though the ultimate nature and destination of the process is uncertain, and may forever remain unknown. Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Humanity’s increasing understanding of the evolution of life in the universe is rapidly bringing it to the threshold of this major evolutionary transition
Cosmology vs. Holography
The most radical version of the holographic principle asserts that all
information about physical processes in the world can be stored on its surface.
This formulation is at odds with inflationary cosmology, which implies that
physical processes in our part of the universe do not depend on the boundary
conditions. Also, there are some indications that the radical version of the
holographic theory in the context of cosmology may have problems with unitarity
and causality. Another formulation of the holographic principle, due to
Fischler and Susskind, implies that the entropy of matter inside the
post-inflationary particle horizon must be smaller than the area of the
horizon. Their conjecture was very successful for a wide class of open and flat
universes, but it did not apply to closed universes. Bak and Rey proposed a
different holographic bound on entropy which was valid for closed universes of
a certain type. However, as we will show, neither proposal applies to open,
flat and closed universes with matter and a small negative cosmological
constant. We will argue, in agreement with Easther, Lowe, and Veneziano, that
whenever the holographic constraint on the entropy inside the horizon is valid,
it follows from the Bekenstein-Hawking bound on the black hole entropy. These
constraints do not allow one to rule out closed universes and other universes
which may experience gravitational collapse, and do not impose any constraints
on inflationary cosmology.Comment: 8 pages, we added one reference and comments about possible problems
with unitarity and causality of the holographic theory in cosmolog
The anthropic principle and the mass scale of the Standard Model
In theories in which different regions of the universe can have different
values of the the physical parameters, we would naturally find ourselves in a
region which has parameters favorable for life. We explore the range of
anthropically allowed values of the mass parameter in the Higgs potential,
. For , the requirement that complex elements be formed
suggests that the Higgs vacuum expectation value must have a magnitude less
than 5 times its observed value. For , baryon stability requires that
, the Planck Mass. Smaller values of may or may not be
allowed depending on issues of element synthesis and stellar evolution. We
conclude that the observed value of is reasonably typical of the
anthropically allowed range, and that anthropic arguments provide a plausible
explanation for the closeness of the QCD scale and the weak scale.Comment: 28 pages, LaTeX. No changes from version originally submitted to
archive, except that problem with figure file has been correcte
- …