The Mystery of the Cosmological Constant

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The real impact of the cosmological constant problem comes from imagining that you treat it as the sum of many different contributions. So there's a vacuum energy in a different quantum field, but there's a separate contribution to the vacuum energy from the electromagnetic field and from the neutrino fields. And the mystery is why in the world do all these positive and negative numbers add up to give you such a tiny number? That's the mystery.

Welcome to the August 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number -- based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good -- and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Blog post with questions and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/08/07/ama-august-2023/

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