Related papers: Was There A Big Bang?

We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…

The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) is the radiation left over from the hot Big Bang. Its blackbody spectrum and small anisotropy provide clues about the origin and early evolution of the Universe. In particular, the spectrum…

The reheating of the universe after hybrid inflation proceeds through the nucleation and subsequent collision of large concentrations of energy density in the form of bubble-like structures moving at relativistic speeds. This generates a…

The discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson led to the establishment of the hot big-bang cosmological model some ten years later. Discoveries made in 1998 may ultimately have as profound an effect on…

The early, hot, dense, expanding Universe was a primordial reactor in which the light nuclides D, 3He, 4He and 7Li were synthesized in astrophysically interesting abundances. The challenge to the standard hot big bang model (Big Bang…

This review describes the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 and its impact on cosmology in the 50 years that followed. This discovery has established the Big Bang model of the Universe and the analysis of its…

Big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), an epoch of primordial nuclear transformations in the expanding Universe, has left an observable imprint in the abundances of light elements. Precision observations of such abundances, combined with…

The existence of big bang relic neutrinos - exact analogues of the big bang relic photons comprising the cosmic microwave background radiation - is a basic prediction of standard cosmology. At present, the observational evidence for their…

According to the standard lore, a prolonged inflation leaves a quantum field theory in a cold, low entropy state. Thus, some mechanism is needed to reheat this post-inflationary state, leaving a hot, thermal, radiation-dominated Universe.…

The blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang has been transformed by the expansion of the Universe into the nearly isotropic 2.73K Cosmic Microwave Background. Tiny inhomogeneities in the early Universe left their imprint on the…

Is the accelerating expansion of the Universe true, inferred through observations of distant supernovae, and is the implied existence of an enormous amount of anti-gravitational dark energy material driving the accelerating expansion of the…

We confront the big bang for the beginning of the universe with an equivalent picture of a slow freeze - a very cold and slowly evolving universe. In the freeze picture the masses of elementary particles increase and the gravitational…

In 1965, the discovery of a new type of uniform radiation, located between radiowaves and infrared light, was accidental. Known today as Cosmic Microwave background (CMB), this diffuse radiation is commonly interpreted as a fossil light…

As the early universe expands and cools the rates of the weak interactions that keep neutrinos in thermal equilibrium with the matter and the related rates of the reactions that inter-convert neutrons and protons decrease. Eventually, these…

It is proposed that when the era of the big-bang nucleosynthesis ended, almost all of the 75 percent of the observed total baryonic matter remained in the form of hydrogen and continued to exist in the form of protons and electrons. They…

The `Little Bangs' made in particle collider experiments reproduce the conditions in the Big Bang when the age of the Universe was a fraction of a second. It is thought that matter was generated, the structures in the Universe were formed…

It is widely accepted that the Universe underwent a period of thermal equilibrium at very early times. One expects a residue of this primordial state to be imprinted on the large scale structure of space time. In this paper we study the…

For two decades the hot big-bang model as been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not answered by the standard cosmology and…

We summarize some applications of big bang nucleosythesis (BBN) and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to constrain the first moments of the creation of matter in the universe. We review the basic elements of BBN and how it constraints…