A Fly in the SOUP

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the SOUP proposal for universe selection, revealing that its corrections only renormalize the cosmological constant without solving initial condition issues for inflation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the SOUP proposal's corrections do not address the fundamental problem of initial conditions for inflation, highlighting a flaw in the original approach.

Findings

Corrections to Euclidean gravity action renormalize the cosmological constant.

The proposal fails to resolve initial condition selection for inflation.

The issue of initial conditions remains unresolved in the SOUP framework.

Abstract

We investigate the Selection of Original Universe Proposal (SOUP) of Tye et al. and show that as it stands, this proposal is flawed. The corrections to the Euclidean gravity action that were to select a Universe with a sufficiently large value of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ to allow for an inflationary phase, only serve to {\it renormalize} the cosmological constant so that $\Lambda \to \Lambda_{\rm eff}$, thereby reintroducing the issue of how to select the initial conditions allowing for inflation in the early Universe.