Related papers: Did time begin? Will time end?
The paper defends the thesis that analysis of time meaning in a context of philosophy of physical and mathematical natural sciences and philosophical anthropology allows to clear basis of human being and to construct special model of…
We present a list of open questions in mathematical physics. After a historical introduction, a number of problems in a variety of different fields are discussed, with the intention of giving an overall impression of the current status of…
Existing physical theories do not predict every feature of our experience but only certain regularities of that experience. That difference between what could be observed and what can be predicted is one kind of limit on scientific…
We explore a cyclic universe due to phantom and quintessence fields. We find that, in every cycle of the evolution of the universe, the phantom dominates the cosmic early history and quintessence dominates the cosmic far future. In this…
Time is one of those issues about which many thinkers and scientists have tried to pronounce their finest thoughts, but the discourse about time has remained vague and often inconsistent. In this paper we put forward a conceptual framework…
Time is absolute in standard quantum theory and dynamical in general relativity. The combination of both theories into a theory of quantum gravity leads therefore to a "problem of time". In my essay I shall investigate those consequences…
This is a chapter for an upcoming book, "Space, Time, and the Limits of Human Understanding", edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Giancarlo Ghirardi. I first present the classical picture of flat space and ever-flowing time, as generally accepted…
Prigogine and Stengers (1988) have pointed to the centrality of the concepts of "time and eternity" for the cosmology contained in Newtonian physics, but they have not addressed this issue beyond the domain of physics. The construction of…
Modern physics has unlocked a number of mysteries regarding the early Universe, such as the baryogenesis, the unification of the strong and electroweak forces and the nucleosynthesis. However, understanding the very early Universe, close to…
This thesis addresses two major problems in the philosophy of physics. The first is how to identify the minimal physical content of a theory; that is, what features of a theory are truly needed to make predictions, and what can be removed…
Barbour, Hawking, Misner and others have argued that time cannot play an essential role in the formulation of a quantum theory of cosmology. Here we present three challenges to their arguments, taken from works and remarks by Kauffman,…
The current state of cosmology is easy to summarize: a very successful standard model -- the hot big-bang cosmology -- that accounts for the evolution of the Universe from 10^{-2} sec until the present; bold ideas based upon early-Universe…
A new speculative model for the expansion of our universe has been under development by the author for the last two decades, which correctly predicts astronomical measurements with no dark matter or dark energy. This new closed model (no…
This short review is addressed to cosmologists. General relativity predicts that space-time comes to an end and physics comes to a halt at the big-bang. Recent developments in loop quantum cosmology have shown that these predictions cannot…
Experience of time is one of the primordial human experiences which is deeply tied to human consciousness. But despite this intimate relation of time with human conscious experience, time has proved to be very elusive. Particularly in…
General relativity predicts a singularity in the beginning of the universe being called big bang. Recent developments in loop quantum cosmology avoid the singularity and the big bang is replaced by a big bounce. A classical theory of…
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is found to be 42 -- but the meaning of this is left open to interpretation. We take it to mean that there…
Have our fundamental theories got time right? Does size really matter? Or is physics all in the eyes of the beholder? In this essay, we question the origin of time and scale by reevaluating the nature of measurement. We then argue for a…
Cosmological inflation, if it occurred, radically alters the picture of the `big bang', which would merely point to reheating at the end of inflation. Moreover, this reheating may be only local, so that inflation continues elsewhere and…
The idea that the cosmological term, Lambda, should be a time dependent quantity in cosmology is a most natural one. It is difficult to conceive an expanding universe with a strictly constant vacuum energy density, namely one that has…