swampwiz said:
I was reading this article at Wikipedia that says particle physics predicts that the cosmological constant is 10^120 larger than per observation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Nobody knows how to calculate the cosmological constant from theory. Not yet. People have come up with various methods of doing so, but so far none are compelling. The simplest such way of calculating the cosmological constant is what leads to this 10^120 error, and it amounts to little more than dimensional analysis.
The way you should read this is that the value for the cosmological constant is very, very weird. Physicists generally feel that it is a number that demands an explanation outside of currently-known physics. Sadly, there aren't yet any clues as to where that answer might come from.
One answer that may be rather unsatisfying is that it may be a consequence of string theory and the weak anthropic principle. String theory, with its 10^400 or so distinct vacuum states, should easily permit numbers as small as this. But it should still be absurdly unlikely to get a number as small as 10^-120. However, if there was a selection effect which required the cosmological constant to be small, then maybe that could get us the rest of the way.
One such selection effect is the weak anthropic principle: observers can only observe conditions that allow them to exist. This principle can be used to explain why we find ourselves living on a planet that is very hospitable to life. Most planets we have observed are extremely inhospitable: no atmosphere, crushing atmosphere, freezing temperatures, blazing hot temperatures, etc. But we observe ourselves in a place that is really excellent for us. Why? Because organisms like ourselves could never have evolved in any of those inhospitable places. Organisms that can ask the question can only ever find themselves in a rather hospitable place (within reason).
And a large cosmological constant makes the universe very inhospitable indeed. If the value of the cosmological constant were only something like 1-2 orders of magnitude larger, no galaxies would ever have formed. So the answer to the question as to why the measured value is so low when the simplest theoretical prediction is so high might just be, "It actually takes a lot of different values, but we had to observe ourselves in a region with a very tiny value or else we couldn't exist in that region."
This answer is very unsatisfying to many theorists, who continue to feel that there
must be another explanation. My suspicion is that the debate is unlikely to be settled anytime soon. It's hard to settle a debate when the evidence is scant.