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Highly speculative recent paper by Lawrence Krauss and James Dent.
Can't help suspecting there is some logical flaw or unjustified assumption.
In any case the paper is short (only 4 pages) and contains several striking speculative ideas, so some may want to check it out if only from curiosity.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.1821
The Late Time Behavior of False Vacuum Decay: Possible Implications for Cosmology and Metastable Inflating States
Lawrence M. Krauss (1,2), James Dent (2) ((1) Case Western Reserve University, (2) Vanderbilt University))
4 pages, submitted to PRL
(Submitted on 12 Nov 2007)
"We describe here how the late time behavior of the decaying states, which is predicted to deviate from an exponential form, while normally of insignificant consequence, may have important cosmological implications in the case of false vacuum decay. It may increase the likelihood of eternal inflation, and may help explain the likelihood of observing a small vacuum energy at late times, as well as arguing against decay into a large negative energy (anti-de Sitter space), vacuum state as has been motivated by some string theory considerations. Several interesting open questions are raised, including whether observing the cosmological configuration of our universe may ultimately alter its mean lifetime."
Thanks to Peter Woit for noticing this
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=621
The senior author, Krauss, is a prominent and respected cosmologist (as well as a popular author). I don't recall ever seeing in his professional papers anything that seemed quite so apt to provoke controversy as this.
Can't help suspecting there is some logical flaw or unjustified assumption.
In any case the paper is short (only 4 pages) and contains several striking speculative ideas, so some may want to check it out if only from curiosity.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.1821
The Late Time Behavior of False Vacuum Decay: Possible Implications for Cosmology and Metastable Inflating States
Lawrence M. Krauss (1,2), James Dent (2) ((1) Case Western Reserve University, (2) Vanderbilt University))
4 pages, submitted to PRL
(Submitted on 12 Nov 2007)
"We describe here how the late time behavior of the decaying states, which is predicted to deviate from an exponential form, while normally of insignificant consequence, may have important cosmological implications in the case of false vacuum decay. It may increase the likelihood of eternal inflation, and may help explain the likelihood of observing a small vacuum energy at late times, as well as arguing against decay into a large negative energy (anti-de Sitter space), vacuum state as has been motivated by some string theory considerations. Several interesting open questions are raised, including whether observing the cosmological configuration of our universe may ultimately alter its mean lifetime."
Thanks to Peter Woit for noticing this
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=621
The senior author, Krauss, is a prominent and respected cosmologist (as well as a popular author). I don't recall ever seeing in his professional papers anything that seemed quite so apt to provoke controversy as this.
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