Since it's beyond a paywall, let me just give the essentials:
Title:
Needle in a Haystack: Our improbable Universe
About the author:
A former collegiate athlete, the author has been recognized by the APS for his long record of NSF-funded research. Outside of physics, he enjoys skiing, and the occasional glass of wine. A dutiful and doting father, he is generally as much of a prick in person as you might expect from this obnoxious blurb.
Abstract:
Have you ever eaten at a brand new restaurant, and wondered what its chances of success are? More than a metaphor, I establish a correspondence between such a probability and the measure problem of cosmology. Based on how one rates the restaurant, one can thereby deduce a proper normalization to establish the probabilities that others will similarly patronize the establishment. With this insight, I compute the most likely value of the cosmological constant and remarkably find that it occurs with the standard measurement to within 2.31 significant deviations without resorting to any anthropic principle.
2 comments:
Gee, too bad they didn't describe you as "the Bad Boy of Physics". (It must be so nice to not have to really worry about little details like experiments.)
Doug, Yes, it's very nice. Experiments are hard, expensive, and they never work right anyway. Besides, who ever heard of a solpsistic experimentalist?
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