Cosmologists expose flaws in anthropic reasoning

Many scientists never liked it anyway, and now Glenn Starkman from Oxford/Case Western and Roberto Trotta from Oxford show that too many details—and too many unknowns—mean that anthropic reasoning gives inconsistent values of the cosmological constant, some that are far from current estimates. In their recent paper, “Why Anthropic Reasoning Cannot Predict Lambda” (Physical Review Letters), Starkman and Trotta find that different ways of defining the probability of observers in different universes leads to vastly different predictions of the cosmological constant.

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<p><a href="http://www.physorg.com/news83924839.html">Cosmologists expose flaws in anthropic reasoning</a></p> <p>Many scientists never liked it anyway, and now Glenn Starkman from Oxford/Case Western and Roberto Trotta from Oxford show that too many details—and too many unknowns—mean that anthropic reasoning gives inconsistent values of the cosmological constant, some that are far from current estimates. In their recent paper, “Why Anthropic Reasoning Cannot Predict Lambda” (<i>Physical Review Letters</i>), Starkman and Trotta find that different ways of defining the probability of observers in different universes leads to vastly different predictions of the cosmological constant.</p>