Could There Be Something Rather Than Nothing?

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that the universe may have a small cosmological constant. We suggest a scheme for naturally generating a small cosmological constant. Our idea requires the presence of a discrete accidental symmetry which is spontaneously broken by vacuum expectation values of the fields, and explicitly broken by high dimensional operators in the Lagrangian.

Comments: 9 pages, 1 ps figure (included), in TeX, using harvmac; HUTP-93/A020