Replacing Anthropy with entropy: Does it work?

TL;DR

This paper critically examines replacing the anthropic principle with the causal entropic principle, showing that it faces similar issues and can lead to predictions inconsistent with our universe due to various physical mechanisms.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that the causal entropic principle cannot reliably replace the anthropic principle because of unanthropic entropy sources and mechanisms altering its predictions.

Findings

CEP is affected by black hole processes and phase transitions.

Unanthropic entropy production challenges CEP's validity.

Predictions of CEP can significantly differ from our universe.

Abstract

Probably not, because there are lots of manifestly unanthropic ways of producing entropy. We demonstrate that the Causal Entropic Principle (CEP), as a replacement for the anthropic principle to explain the properties of the observed universe, suffers from many of the same problems of adopting myopic assumptions in order to predict that various fundamental parameters take approximately the observed values. In particular, we demonstrate that four mechanisms -- black hole production, black hole decay, phase transitions, and dark matter annihilations or decays -- will manifestly change the conclusions of the CEP to predict that we should live in a universe quite different than the one in which we find ourselves.