Vacuum energy density and gravitational entropy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The failure to calculate the vacuum energy is a central problem in theoretical physics. Presumably the problem arises from the insistent use of effective field theory reasoning in a context that is well beyond its intended scope. If one follows this path, then one is led inevitably to statistical or anthropic reasoning for observations. It appears that a more palatable resolution of the vacuum energy problem requires some form of UV/IR feedback. In this paper we take the point of view that such feedback can be thought of as arising by defining a notion of quantum space-time. We reformulate the regularized computation of vacuum energy in such a way that it can be interpreted in terms of a sum over elementary phase space volumes, that we identify with a ground state degeneracy. This observation yields a precise notion of UV/IR feedback, while leaving a scale unfixed. Here we argue that holography can be thought to provide a key piece of information: we show that equating this microscopic ground state degeneracy with macroscopic gravitational entropy yields a prediction for the vacuum energy that can easily be consistent with observations. Essentially, the smallness of the vacuum energy is tied to the large size of the Universe. We discuss how within this scenario notions of effective field theory can go so wrong.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".