Tufts/CfA/MIT Cosmology Seminar, at Tufts:

Tuesday, December 2, 2008
2:30 pm
Robinson Hall, Room 250
Refreshments at 2:00 in Knipp Library, Room 251

"The scale-factor cutoff measure on the multiverse"

Michael Salem
Tufts University

Abstract:

There is circumstantial evidence that our universe is merely a pocket in an eternally inflating multiverse containing a diverse array of other pocket universes. In this picture, predicting the expectation values of independent observables requires regulating a diverging number of events. I'll discuss one such spacetime regulator, the scale-factor cutoff measure, and comment on how it avoids certain phenomenological pathologies that plague other regulators. I'll describe this measure's explanation of the cosmological constant, and provide a toy-model prediction of the curvature parameter in our universe.

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