Related papers: The cosmology of the Divine Comedy
This article presents a brief review of some historical and philosophical aspects of Einstein's 1917 paper 'Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity', a landmark work that denoted the starting point of modern…
The apparent fine-tuning of several fundamental parameters that determine the properties of our Universe and make it hospitable to life is sometimes used as an argument for God from design. I review the concept of cosmic fine-tuning and…
This paper was written as part of a book entitled: "Questions of Modern Cosmology - Galileo's Legacy" which is a celebrative book dedicated to Galileo Galilei. The book is published in 2009, the International Year of Astronomy, since it is…
The powerful Lagrangian view of structure formation was essentially introduced to cosmology by Zel'dovich. In the current cosmological paradigm, a dark-matter-sheet 3D manifold, inhabiting 6D position-velocity phase space, was flat (with…
This article (which appeared with illustrations) was the astrophysics/cosmology contribution to the historical series ``Pathways of Discovery'' which appeared in ``Science'' during last year.
Hipparchus is considered the greatest astronomer of antiquity. However, his fame is due, more than to what he has done, or said, or written, to what the scientists of some generation or of a few cen-turies later have written of him: above…
We comment on the paper [1] by Albert Einstein from 1918 to Willem De Sitter's solution [2] of the Einstein field equation from today's point of view. To this end, we start by describing the geometry of the De Sitter space-time and present…
The network of cosmological tests is tight enough now to show that the relativistic Big Bang cosmology is a good approximation to what happened as the universe expanded and cooled through light element production and evolved to the present.…
The early universe according to the big bang and the grand unified theories is discussed. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay…
When visiting the Museum of Modern Art's special exhibit ''van Gogh and the Colors of the Night (New York, USA, 2008)'' I was impressed by the artist's effort to paint and write about landscapes and life scenes at night. At the same time a…
I give a compact, pedagogical review of our present understanding of the universe as based on general relativity. This includes the uniform models, with special reference to the cosmological 'constant'; and the equations for…
A cosmological model is proposed which uses a causality argument to solve the homogeneity and entropy problems of cosmology. In this model a chronology violating region of spacetime causally precedes the remainder of the Universe, and a…
This paper gives an elementary introduction to some of the conceptual problems of quantum cosmology. Contents: 1. Why quantum cosmology? 2. Time in quantum gravity 3.Decoherence and the recovery of the Schrodinger equation 4. The direction…
Centre manifold theory is applied to some dynamical systems arising from spatially homogeneous cosmological models. Detailed information is obtained concerning the late-time behaviour of solutions of the Einstein equations of Bianchi type…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
The flat matter dominated Universe that dominated cosmological model building for much of the past 20 years does not correspond to the Universe in which we live. This has profound implications both for our understanding of dark matter, and…
Since 2004, I have been collaborating with artist Josiah McElheny on the design of cosmological sculptures, inspired originally by the chandeliers of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. This article describes the science behind the…
Traditionally, higher-dimensional cosmological models have sought to provide a description of the fundamental forces in terms of a unifying geometrical construction. In this essay we discuss how, in their present incarnation,…
We study early universe cosmologies derived from a scalar-tensor action containing cosmological constant terms and massless fields. The governing equations can be written as a dynamical system which contains no past or future asymptotic…
The paper deals with a cosmological model containing two scalar fields which can be considered as an extension of the Brans-Dicke scalar field model. Due to highly coupled non linear field equations, Noether Symmetry analysis has been…