Related papers: Sociology of Modern Cosmology
If our universe has appeared in a result of Big Bang or something like this, whether we have reasons to deny an existence of other universes appearing by the same or similar way? An objection that there is no anything like it, is doubtful,…
This is a review of the physics and cosmology of the cosmological constant. Focusing on recent developments, I present a pedagogical overview of cosmology in the presence of a cosmological constant, observational constraints on its…
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)…
The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We discuss…
Although many people have thought that the difference between the Copenhagen and many-worlds versions of quantum theory was merely metaphysical, quantum cosmology may allow us to make a physical test to distinguish between them empirically.…
I argue that some important elements of the current cosmological model are "conventionalist" in the sense defined by Karl Popper. These elements include dark matter and dark energy; both are auxiliary hypotheses that were invoked in…
The standard LambdaCDM cosmology passes demanding tests that establish it as a good approximation to reality. It is incomplete, with open questions and anomalies, but the same is true of all our physical theories. The anomalies in the…
The $\Lambda$CDM cosmology passes demanding tests that establish it as a good approximation to reality. The theory is incomplete, of course, and open issues are being examined in active research programs. I offer a review of less widely…
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…
We discuss scientific realism from the perspective of modern cosmology, especially primordial cosmology: i.e. the cosmological investigation of the very early universe. We first (Section 2) state our allegiance to scientific realism, and…
In cosmology, we would like to explain our observations and predict future observations from theories of the entire universe. Such cosmological theories make ontological assumptions of what entities exist and what their properties and…
Multiverse scenarios in cosmology assume that other universes exist "beyond" our own universe. They are an exciting challenge both for empirical and theoretical research as well as for philosophy of science. They could be necessary to…
Modern cosmology has created a tight link between particle physics / field theory and a wealth of new observational data on the structure of the Universe. These lecture notes focus on some of the most important aspects concerning the…
We have had the chance to live through a fascinating revolution in measuring the fundamental empirical cosmological Hubble law. The key progress is analysed : 1) improvement of observational means (ground-based radio and optical…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
The universe we observe is homogeneous on super-horizon scales, leading to the ``cosmic homogeneity problem''. Inflation alleviates this problem but cannot solve it within the realm of conservative extrapolations of classical physics. A…
The cosmological principle says that the Universe is spatially homogeneous and isotropic. It predicts, among other phenomena, the cosmic redshift of light and the Hubble law. Nevertheless, the existence of structure in the Universe violates…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the existence of homogeneous surfaces as the background arena for structure formation. Homogeneity underpins both general relativistic and modified gravity models and is central to the way in…
Over the last decade, cosmological observations have attained a level of precision which allows for detailed comparison with theoretical predictions. In this paper, we briefly review some studies of the current and prospected constraints…
The standard model of cosmology assumes that the Universe can be described to hover around a homogeneous-isotropic solution of Einstein's general theory of relativity. This description needs (sometimes hidden) hypotheses that restrict the…