Raphael Bousso

Raphael Bousso (born 1971) is a German theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Quotes

• The vacua with positive cosmological constant trap the universe in eternal inflation. They decay only locally, by producing bubbles of new vacua. Thus, every vacuum in the landscape will be realized an infinite number of times in different, causally disconnected regions. Each bubble expands to become an infinite open universe embedded in the global spacetime.
  • "Holographic probabilities in eternal inflation." Physical review letters 97, no. 19 (2006): 191302. arXiv preprint

• There are 10⁵⁰⁰ or more metastable vacua, which can be thought of as local minima in a huge, multidimensional potential landscape. They differ not only in the value of their vacuum energy, but in their entire low-energy effective field theory, which is determined by local properties near the foot of a valley and thus only very indirectly by the fundamental building blocks of the landscape. Different vacua will have different matter content, coupling constants, and forces. We will not predict the standard model uniquely. We will have to predict many of the features of our universe statistically, from their relative abundance in the landscape.
  • "The cosmological constant." General Relativity and Gravitation 40, no. 2-3 (2008): 607–637. arXiv preprint (p. 29)