Bonus: Damon Binder on Economic History and the Future of Physics
Hear This Idea
00:00
The Cosmological Constant Is Not Zero, but It's Close to Zero
In the 90s we discovered there was in fact a cosmological constant. It was about the size that Weinberg predicted. And it also basically killed any reasonable way to theoretically explain why it was zero because explaining why something is exactly mathematically zero, it's hard. We don't know even if there are other universes,. If there were, like what the distribution would be. In this case, I think there was reason to think it would be about as big as it should be. The same logic also applies to the Higgs mass. Now we actually just kind of have an explanation for why we see an unusual Higgs mass - and it's a very unsatisfying one.
Transcript
Play full episode
