Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant

By L. Dyson, Matthew Kleban, L. Susskind. 2002

421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we consider the implications of a cosmological constant for the evolution of the universe, under a set of assumptions motivated by the holographic and horizon complementarity principles. We discuss the ``causal patch'' description of spacetime required by this framework, and present some simple examples of cosmologies described this way. We argue that these assumptions inevitably lead to very deep paradoxes, which seem to require major revisions of our usual assumptions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34e85f0eb3c0f8ae8d4ee9b6860187b304928d12

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Stanford
2. D. Harlow
3. L. Susskind
4. Andrei Linde
5. S. Shenker
6. J. Maldacena
7. Daniel A. Roberts
8. Phil Saad

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. D. Stanford
2. D. Harlow
3. L. Susskind
4. J. Maldacena
5. S. Shenker
6. Phil Saad
7. Daniel A. Roberts
8. Andrei Linde

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. D. Stanford
2. Phil Saad
3. D. Harlow
4. S. Shenker
5. Jordan S. Cotler
6. L. Susskind
7. V. Hubeny
8. Daniel A. Roberts

Citations in the corpus

• The Annular Report on Non-Critical String Theory (2003, methodology): “It would be interesting to understand the relation between the arguments of [45, 46, 47] and the construction of quantum de Sitter space in two dimensions that we have presented here.”
• Sinks in the landscape, Boltzmann brains and the cosmological constant problem (2006, methodology): “The probability of such events will be incredibly small, but it was argued in [28] that the typical time τ required for a spontaneous noninflationary materialization of the world similar to ours is much shorter than the time required to jump back to the dS space with higher energy density and initia”
• Quantum computation vs. firewalls (2013, methodology): “This is the phenomenon of Poincaré recurrence [19].”
• A semiclassical ramp in SYK and in gravity (2018, background): “However, discrete sums of oscillating terms like f(T ) cannot decay to zero at late time [2, 4, 5, 6].”
• Spontaneous inflation and the origin of the arrow of time (2004, methodology): “Recently, Garriga and Vilenkin [35] have suggested that spontaneous inflation in a low-energy de Sitter background could lead to a recycling universe, while Dyson, Kleban and Susskind and Albrecht and Sorbo have examined spontaneous inflation in the context of a causal-patch view inspired by the hol”
• The trouble with de Sitter space (2002, methodology): “For a system with entropy S the level spacing is of order exp (−S) and the time scale is the Poincare recurrence [15, 16, 17] time tp ∼ expS.”
• Black holes and random matrices (2016, background): “If the spectrum has no degeneracies (2)The authors of [5] use this idea in a closely related context.”
• Initial Conditions for Inflation (2002, background): “This solves the so-called horizon and flatness problems (but see [36] for a discussion of the genericity of inflationary initial conditions).”
• Chaos and complexity by design (2016, background): “there is an error in this calculation as presented in [61, 62] and so interested readers should consult [63] for the actual details.”
• The black hole singularity in AdS/CFT (2003, background): “A complete description of eternal inflation [17] probably requires an understanding of the many “universes” behind the de Sitter horizon of a single inflating patch [18, 19 ,20].”