Related papers: The cosmology of the Divine Comedy
The standard cosmological model, based on Cold Dark Matter and Dark Energy ({\Lambda}CDM), faces several challenges. Among these is the need to adjust the scenario to account for he presence of vast voids in the large-scale structure of the…
Astrobiology is the field of science devoted to searching for life elsewhere in the Universe. It is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating results from multiple fields of science, and in this respect has strong synergies with 'big…
Did the universe have a beginning or does it exist forever, i.e. is it eternal at least in relation to the past? This fundamental question was a main topic in ancient philosophy of nature and the Middle Ages. Philosophically it was more or…
Cosmology now has a standard model - a remarkably simple description of the universe, its contents and its history. A symposium held last September in Cambridge, UK, gave this model a 'health check' and discussed fascinating questions that…
In this work, an attempt is presented to understand the contribution of Galileo Galilei in the field of the History of Ideas, from the moment he points a spyglass to the sky. For that, it was previously necessary that Giotto painting the…
This is the summary of two lectures that aim to give an overview of cosmology. I will not try to be too rigorous in derivations, nor to give a full historical overview. The idea is to provide a "taste" of cosmology and some of the…
In the past several decades, multiple cosmological theories that are based on the contention that the Universe has a major axis have been proposed. Such theories can be based on the geometry of the Universe, or multiverse theories such as…
We consider the general behaviour of cosmologies in Brans-Dicke theory where the dilaton is self-interacting via a potential $V(\Phi)$. We show that the general radiation universe is a two-dimensional dynamical system whereas the dust or…
I discuss how modern cosmology illustrates under-determination of theoretical hypotheses by data, in ways that are different from most philosophical discussions. I emphasize cosmology's concern with what data could in principle be collected…
We investigate quantum cosmological models in an n-dimensional anisotropic universe in the presence of a massless scalar field. Our basic inspiration comes from Chodos and Detweiler's classical model which predicts an interesting behaviour…
We develop a unified, dynamical-systems narrative of the universe that traces a continuous chain of structure formation from the Big Bang to contemporary human societies and their artificial learning systems. Rather than treating cosmology,…
Cosmology and particle physics are deeply interrelated. Among the common problems are dark energy, dark matter and baryon asymmetry of the Universe. We discuss these problems in general terms, and concentrate on several particular…
This paper is intended to offer a pedagogical treatment of cosmological modeling and inflationary cosmology. In recent years, inflation has become accepted as a standard scenario making predictions that are testable by observations of the…
The cosmological model best capable of fitting current observational data features two separate epochs during which the Universe is accelerating. During the earliest stages of the Universe, such acceleration is known as cosmological…
This talk presents an overview of the brane cosmology scenario, based on the idea that our Universe is a 3-brane embedded in a five-dimensional anti-de Sitter bulk space-time. Special emphasis is put on the novel features of this scenario:…
The expansion of our universe, when followed backward in time, implies that it emerged from a phase of huge density, the big bang. These stages are so extreme that classical general relativity combined with matter theories is not able to…
A cosmology is considered driven by a stress-energy tensor consisting of a perfect fluid, an inhomogeneous pressure term (which we call a ``tachyonic dust'' for reasons which will become apparent) and a cosmological constant. The…
Extragalactic HI astronomy is half a century old. Its maturity dramatically increased in the 1970s, with the commissioning of new powerful facilities. Its contributions to Cosmology are important, from the observation of galaxy rotation…
We perform a detailed dynamical analysis of various cosmological scenarios in extended (varying-mass) nonlinear massive gravity. Due to the enhanced freedom in choosing the involved free functions, this cosmological paradigm allows for a…
We present a semiclassical study of the Mixmaster cosmology minimally coupled to a massive scalar field in the Hamiltonian formalism, with focus on three distinct scenarios: the classical cosmology coupled to the quantized scalar field, and…