The Anthropic Principle and the Multiverse

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Most people before 1998 thought that we would eventually show that the cosmological constant is zero. But then it's not zero, probably, if the vacuum energy really is the reason why the universe is accelerating. So guess what? There is this old idea that people have been banded around called the anthropic principle and the multiverse. The idea that if you have in the universe different regions where the local laws of physics are different, then by a selection effect, we complicated, intelligent, complex beings would only find ourselves in some subset of those possibilities. It's environmental selection. In the solar system there are conditions that are hospitable to life and conditions that are inhospitable. Of

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

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