Why Boltzmann Brains Don't Fluctuate Into Existence From the De Sitter Vacuum

Abstract

Many modern cosmological scenarios feature large volumes of spacetime in a de Sitter vacuum phase. Such models are said to be faced with a "Boltzmann Brain problem" - the overwhelming majority of observers with fixed local conditions are random fluctuations in the de Sitter vacuum, rather than arising via thermodynamically sensible evolution from a low-entropy past. We argue that this worry can be straightforwardly avoided in the Many-Worlds (Everett) approach to quantum mechanics, as long as the underlying Hilbert space is infinite-dimensional. In that case, de Sitter settles into a truly stationary quantum vacuum state. While there would be a nonzero probability for observing Boltzmann-Brain-like fluctuations in such a state, "observation" refers to a specific kind of dynamical process that does not occur in the vacuum (which is, after all, time-independent). Observers are necessarily out-of-equilibrium physical systems, which are absent in the vacuum. Hence, the fact that projection operators corresponding to states with observers in them do not annihilate the vacuum does not imply that such observers actually come into existence. The Boltzmann Brain problem is therefore much less generic than has been supposed.