The weak anthropic principle and the landscape of string theory

TL;DR

This paper discusses how the weak anthropic principle applied to the string theory landscape can lead to predictions about the cosmological constant, favoring negative values contrary to observations, depending on the structure of vacua.

Contribution

It presents a novel argument that the weak anthropic principle can yield falsifiable predictions within string theory's landscape, specifically about the sign of the cosmological constant.

Findings

WAP favors negative cosmological constant based on landscape vacua.

Infinite vacua for positive $\

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Abstract

We note that there is an exception to the general arguments that no falsifiable predictions can be made, on the basis of of presently available data, by applying the weak anthropic principle (WAP) to the landscape of string theory. If there are infinitely more vacua in the landscape for one sign of a parameter than the other, within an anthropicaly allowed range, then under very weak assumptions about the probability measure one gets a firm prediction favoring that sign of that parameter. It is interesting to note that while the understanding of the string landscape is evolving, present evidence on the nature of the landscape allows such an argument to be made, leading to the conclusion that the WAP favors a negative value for the cosmological constant, $\Lambda$, in contradiction to the result of astronomical observations. The viability of applying the WAP to string theory then requires that either there are found an infinite discretum of anthropically allowed vacua for $\Lambda >0$, or the recently found infinite discretum of solutions for $\Lambda <0$ be reduced to a finite value.