CHAPTER 16: Anthropic Reasoning and Quantum Cosmology
This is a slightly abbreviated version of an article that appeared in The New Cosmology: Proc. Conf. Strings and Cosmology, College Station, Texas, March 14–17, 2004, eds. R. Allen, D. Nanopoulos and C. Pope, AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 743 (American Institute of Physics, Melville, NY, 2004).
Prediction in quantum cosmology requires a specification of the universe’s quantum dynamics and its quantum state. We expect only a few general features of the universe to be predicted with probabilities near unity conditioned on the dynamics and quantum state alone. Most useful predictions are of conditional probabilities that assume additional information beyond the dynamics and quantum state. Anthropic reasoning utilizes probabilities conditioned on “us”. This paper discusses the utility, limitations and theoretical uncertainty involved in using such probabilities. The predictions resulting from various levels of ignorance of the quantum state are discussed.
