DO WORMHOLES FIX THE CONSTANTS OF NATURE

This paper examines the claim that the wormhole effects that cause the cosmological constant to be zero, also fix the values of all the other effective coupling constants. It is shown that the assumption that wormholes can be replaced by effective interactions is valid in perturbation theory, but it leads to a path integral that does not converge. Even if one ignores this difficulty, the probability measure on the space of effective coupling constants diverges. This does not affect the conclusion that the cosmological constant should be zero. However, to find the probability distribution for other coupling constants, one has to introduce a cutoff in the probability distribution. The results depend very much on the cutoff used. For one choice of cutoff at least, the coupling constants do not have unique values, but have a gaussian probability distribution. © 1990.