Cosmological constant caused by observer-induced boundary condition

TL;DR

This paper proposes that the cosmological constant arises from observer-induced boundary conditions in spacetime, providing a new explanation for dark energy that aligns with observations and resolves the cosmic coincidence problem.

Contribution

It introduces a novel boundary condition framework linking observer effects to the cosmological constant, differing from standard dark energy models.

Findings

The derived cosmological constant matches observed values within 2σ errors.

The theory explains accelerated expansion as an observer-induced edge effect.

It satisfies Big Bang nucleosynthesis and CMB constraints as well as standard models.

Abstract

The evolution of the wave function in quantum mechanics is deterministic like that of classical waves. Only when we bring in observers the fundamentally different quantum reality emerges. Similarly the introduction of observers changes the nature of spacetime by causing a split between past and future, concepts that are not well defined in the observer-free world. The induced temporal boundary leads to a resonance condition for the oscillatory vacuum solutions of the metric in Euclidean time. It corresponds to an exponential de Sitter evolution in real time, which can be represented by a cosmological constant $\Lambda =2\pi^2/r_u^2$, where $r_u$ is the radius of the particle horizon at the epoch when the observer exists. For the present epoch we get a value of $\Lambda$ that agrees with the observed value within $2\sigma$ of the observational errors. This explanation resolves the cosmic coincidence problem. Our epoch in cosmic history does not herald the onset of an inflationary phase driven by some dark energy. We show that the observed accelerated expansion that is deduced from the redshifts is an "edge effect" due to the observer-induced boundary and not representative of the intrinsic evolution. The new theory satisfies the BBN (Big Bang nucleosynthesis) and CMB (cosmic microwave background) observational constraints equally well as the concordance model of standard cosmology. There is no link between the dark energy and dark matter problems. Previous conclusions that dark matter is mainly non-baryonic are not affected.