Related papers: The cosmology of the Divine Comedy
Cosmology can be viewed as geodesic motion in an appropriate metric on an `augmented' target space; here we obtain these geodesics from an effective relativistic particle action. As an application, we find some exact (flat and curved)…
A five-dimensional cosmological theory of gravitation that unifies space, time and velocity is presented
Soon after he proposed three classic observational tests for the general theory of relativity, Einstein realised that a consistent description of the universe as a whole provided another important challenge for the theory. In this essay, we…
For most of its history, cosmology was a qualitatively constrained discourse on the universe, shaped by limited observational access and the absence of global dynamical laws. This situation has changed decisively in recent decades. Modern…
Influenced by the renaissance of general relativity that came to pass in the 1950s, the character of cosmology fundamentally changed in the 1960s as it became a well-established empirical science. Although observations went to dominate its…
Arising out of an attempt at a new foundations of mathematics, in which relations are more primitive than sets, and out of the theoretical physicists' concept of underlying causes of empirical phenomena, the idea of a purely mathematical…
The state of our understanding of cosmology is reviewed from an astrophysical cosmologist point of view with a particular emphasis given to recent observations and their impact. Discussion is then presented on the implications for particle…
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like…
Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has grappled with the big questions of existence and creation. Modern cosmology seeks to answer some of these questions using a combination of mathematics and measurement. The questions people hope…
We investigate the cosmological behavior in a universe governed by time asymmetric extensions of general relativity, which is a novel modified gravity based on the addition of new, time-asymmetric, terms on the Hamiltonian framework, in a…
Cosmology and high energy physics are two closely connected areas. In this lecture I present an example of their rich interplay.
"El Cielo de Salamanca" ("The Sky of Salamanca") is a quarter-sphere-shaped vault 8.70 metres in diameter. It was painted sometime between 1480 and 1493 and shows five zodiacal constellations, three boreal and six austral. The Sun and…
A cosmological description of the universe is proposed in the context of Hamiltonian formulation of a Bianchi IX cosmology minimally coupled to a massless scalar field. The classical and quantum results are studied with special attention to…
Randomness is an unavoidable notion in discussing quantum physics, and this may trigger the curiosity to know more of its cultural history. This text is an invitation to explore the position on the matter of Thomas Aquinas, one of the most…
One of the next decade's most exciting prospects is to explore the cosmic "dark ages," during which the first stars in the Universe formed, with the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen. At z>6, this light redshifts into the low-frequency radio…
Are symmetries discovered or rather invented by humans ? The stand you may take firmly here reveals a lot of your epistemological position. Conversely, the arguments you may forge for answering to this question, or to one of its numerous…
Cosmology today is confronted with several seemingly insoluble puzzles and strange, inexplicable coincidences. But a careful re-examination of the Cosmological principle and the Weyl postulate, foundational elements in this subject,…
Quel est, ou pourrait \^etre, la topologie globale de la partie spatiale de l'Univers ? L'Univers entier (pr\'ecis\'ement, l'hypersurface spatiale de celui-ci) est-il observable ? Les math\'ematiciens, les physiciens et les cosmologistes…
Based on a more careful canonical analysis, we motivate a reduced quantization - in the sense of superspace quantization - of slightly inhomogeneous cosmology in place of the Dirac quantization in the existing literature, and provide it in…
How is the universe organized on large scales? How did this structure evolve from the unknown initial conditions to the present time? The answers to these questions will shed light on the cosmology we live in, the amount, composition and…