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 , 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 Λ that agrees with the observed value within 2σ 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.
Highlights
The cosmological constant had to be reintroduced as a free modeling parameter after the unexpected discovery of the cosmic acceleration in the end of the 1990s through the use of supernovae type Ia as standard candles (Riess et al 1998, Perlmutter et al 1999)
It is some 120 orders of magnitude smaller than one would expect for vacuum fluctuations in quantum field theory. It is interpreted as representing some new kind of physical field, referred to as “dark energy”, but its appearance as a constant would imply that our present time is singled out in cosmic history as exceptionally special
The “” would signal the onset of an inflationary phase driven by the dark energy for all eternity, in the past this energy was insignificant by many orders of magnitude
Summary
The cosmological constant had to be reintroduced as a free modeling parameter after the unexpected discovery of the cosmic acceleration in the end of the 1990s through the use of supernovae type Ia as standard candles (Riess et al 1998, Perlmutter et al 1999). While the analytical expression for the cosmological constant was derived in our previous papers on this topic, starting with Stenflo (2018), the viability of the theory has remained undetermined, because the appropriate cosmological framework that would allow confrontation with the observational constraints has been missing To address this we need a new conceptual interpretation of the meaning and physical implications of the observer-induced boundary condition. The resonance condition implies that the value of the cosmological constant is tied to the conformal age ηu of the universe, such that Λ ∼ 1/ηu2 This leads to a different cosmological framework with implications for cosmic history, as explained in Sect.
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