Related papers: Possible Anthropic Support for a Decaying Universe…
A new cosmological model makes the following predictions: (1) The deceleration parameter $q_{0}$ is approximately zero. (2) The mass density parameter $\Omega_{m}$ is less than 1. (3) The universe is spatially closed, but is asymptotically…
It has been suggested that by increasing the speed of light during the early universe various cosmological problems of standard big bang cosmology can be overcome, without requiring an inflationary phase. However, we find that as the Planck…
The doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive…
We consider the cosmological dynamics associated with volume weighted measures of eternal inflation, in the Bousso-Polchinski model of the string theory landscape. We find that this measure predicts that observers are most likely to find…
There are now two cosmological constant problems: (i) why the vacuum energy is so small and (ii) why it comes to dominate at about the epoch of galaxy formation. Anthropic selection appears to be the only approach that can naturally resolve…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…
Last couple of decades have been the golden age for cosmology. High quality data confirmed the broad paradigm of standard cosmology but have thrusted upon us a preposterous composition for the universe which defies any simple explanation,…
An accelerated universe should naturally have a vacuum energy density determined by its dynamical curvature. The cosmological constant is most likely a temporary description of a dynamical variable that has been drastically evolving from…
Most of the calculations done to obtain the value of the cosmological constant use methods of quantum gravity, a theory that has not been established as yet, and a variety of results are usually obtained. The numerical value of the…
Age consistency for the Universe today has been an important cosmological test. Even more powerful consistency tests at times as early as 10^{-32} sec lie ahead in the precision era of cosmology. I outline tests based upon cosmic microwave…
In this paper, it is shown that the cosmological model that was introduced in a sequence of three earlier papers under the title, A Dust Universe Solution to the Dark Energy Problem can be used to analyse and solve the Cosmological…
The expansion of the universe may be observed in ``realtime'' by measuring changes in the patterns of the anisotropy in the CMB. As the universe ages, the surface of decoupling--or the CMB photosphere--moves away from us and samples a…
The recent suggestion that late time quantum dynamics may be important for resolving cosmological issues associated with our observed universe requires a consideration of several subtle issues associated with quantum cosmology, as we…
In this paper we study the viability of an entropic cosmological model. The effects of entropic gravity are derived from a modified entropy-area relationship with a volumetric entropy term. This model describes a late time limit cosmic…
We study a uniform and isotropic cosmology with a decaying vacuum energy density, in the realm of a model with a time varying gravitational "constant". We show that, for late times, such a cosmology is in accordance with the observed values…
We classify the future of the universe for general cosmological models including matter and dark energy. If the equation of state of dark energy is less then -1, the age of the universe becomes finite. We compute the rest of the age of the…
I discuss various thoughts, old and new, about the cosmological constant (or dark energy) paradox. In particular, I suggest the possibility that the cosmological ``constant'' may decay as $\Lambda \sim \alpha^2 m_N^3 / \tau$, where $\tau$…
When one combines multiverse predictions by Bousso, Hall, and Nomura for the observed age and size of the universe in terms of the proton and electron charge and masses with anthropic predictions of Carter, Carr, and Rees for these masses…
We propose an approach to explaining why naive large quantum fluctuations are not the right estimate for the cosmological constant. We argue that the universe is in a superposition of many vacua, in such a way that the resulting…
An overview is presented of a recently proposed "radically conservative" solution to the problem of dark energy in cosmology. The proposal yields a model universe which appears to be quantitatively viable, in terms of its fit to supernovae…