PIRSA:24110066 Scientific Series

DOI10.48660/24110066

Series: Quantum Gravity

Kowalski-Glikman, J. (2024). Why there is (almost) nothing rather than something? On the cosmological constant problem.. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/24110066

Kowalski-Glikman, Jerzy. Why there is (almost) nothing rather than something? On the cosmological constant problem.. Perimeter Institute, Nov. 14, 2024, https://pirsa.org/24110066 

@misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:24110066,
  doi = {10.48660/24110066},
  url = {https://pirsa.org/24110066},
  author = {Kowalski-Glikman, Jerzy},
  keywords = {},
  language = {en},
  title = {Why there is (almost) nothing rather than something? On the cosmological constant problem.},
  publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
  year = {2024},
  month = {nov},
  note = {PIRSA:24110066 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
}

Abstract

The failure to calculate the vacuum energy remains a central problem in theoretical physics. In my talk I present a new understanding of the cosmological constant problem, grounded in the insight that vacuum energy density can be expressed in terms of phase space volume. Introduction of a UV-IR regularization implies a relationship between the vacuum energy and entropy. Combining this insight with the holographic bound on entropy then yields a bound on the cosmological constant consistent with observations. It follows that the universe is large, and the cosmological constant is naturally small, because the universe is filled with a large number of degrees of freedom. The talk is based on our papers Phys.Rev.D 107 (2023) 12, 126016; e-Print: 2212.00901 [hep-th] and Int.J.Mod.Phys.D 32 (2023) 14, 2342004; e-Print: 2303.17495 [hep-th].

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