Is cosmological tuning fine or coarse?

DOI10.1088/1475-7516/2021/07/020MaRDI QIDQ5029540zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón, Ola G. Hössjer, Robert J. II. Marks

Publication date 14 February 2022

Published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.05400

zbMATH Keywords

gravityinitial conditions and eternal universephysics of the early universe

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Propagation of singularities; initial value problems on manifolds (58J47) Relativistic cosmology (83F05) General biology and biomathematics (92B05) Measures of information, entropy (94A17)

Abstract: The fine-tuning of the universe for life, the idea that the constants of nature (or ratios between them) must belong to very small intervals in order for life to exist, has been debated by scientists for several decades. Several criticisms have emerged concerning probabilistic measurement of life-permitting intervals. Herein, a Bayesian statistical approach is used to assign an upper bound for the probability of tuning, which is invariant with respect to change of physical units, and under certain assumptions it is small whenever the life-permitting interval is small on a relative scale. The computation of the upper bound of the tuning probability is achieved by first assuming that the prior is chosen by the principle of maximum entropy (MaxEnt). The unknown parameters of this MaxEnt distribution are then handled in such a way that the weak anthropic principle is not violated. The MaxEnt assumption is "maximally noncommittal with regard to missing information." This approach is sufficiently general to be applied to constants of current cosmological models, or to other constants possibly under different models. Application of the MaxEnt model reveals, for example, that the ratio of the universal gravitational constant to the square of the Hubble constant is finely tuned in some cases, whereas the amplitude of primordial fluctuations is not.

Recommendations

• Sometimes size does not matter
• Fine-tuning in the context of Bayesian theory testing
• The apparent fine-tuning of the cosmological, gravitational and fine structure constants
• Problems with the argument from fine tuning
• Which fine-tuning arguments are fine?

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Cited in

(12)

• The apparent fine-tuning of the cosmological, gravitational and fine structure constants
• Fine tuning of parameters of the universe
• On the empirical inaccessibility of higher-level modality and its significance for cosmological fine-tuning
• Sometimes size does not matter
• Finely tuned models sacrifice explanatory depth
• Finetuned cancellations and improbable theories
• Problems with the argument from fine tuning
• Which fine-tuning arguments are fine?
• Exploring the self-tuning of the cosmological constant from Planck mass variation
• The inevitability of fine tuning in a complex universe
• Life, the multiverse, and fine-tuning. Fact, fiction, and misconceptions
• Correcting prevalence estimation for biased sampling with testing errors

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