THE anthropic principle – which argues that our universe is finely tuned to support life and there is no point in asking why it is so – has been criticised as lazy, untestable science. Now there may be a way to test the theory for one of the most problematic instances of fine-tuning.
Cosmologists have observed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and have attributed this to an inherent energy of space-time described by the so-called cosmological constant (CC). Quantum physics predicts that the CC should be more than 10120 times larger than observed – a value…
