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Science 26 May 2006:
Vol. 312. no. 5777, p. 1101
DOI: 10.1126/science.312.5777.1101d
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This Week in Science
In the standard Big Bang model, the amount of dark energy in the universe is roughly the same order of magnitude as energy in the form of matter, but this need not have been the case. Dark energy, parameterized as the cosmological constant, could have been trillions of times greater or smaller. This fine tuning has been explained by the anthropic principle--we would not be here if the cosmological parameters had been much different. Steinhardt and Turok (p. 1180, published online 4 May; see the Perspective by Vilenkin) propose an alternative way to tune the cosmological constant down to a small value. They model dark energy in a cyclic universe--a repeating succession of universes growing from big bangs and collapsing into big crunches--and find that most of the time the value of the cosmological constant is small and positive.
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)
