Related papers: Possible Anthropic Support for a Decaying Universe…
Structure occurs over a vast range of scales in the universe. Our large-scale cosmological models are coarse-grained representations of what exists, which have much less structure than there really is. An important problem for cosmology is…
The observed late-time acceleration of the Universe may be the result of unknown physical processes involving either modifications of gravitation theory or the existence of new fields in high energy physics. In the former case, such…
The standard Friedmann universe embedded in a five dimensional and constant curvature bulk is examined without any a priori junction condition between the brane and the bulk. A geometrical explanation for the accelerated expansion of the…
Motivated by recent work of Bousso and Polchinski (BP), we study theories which explain the small value of the cosmological constant using the anthropic principle. We argue that simultaneous solution of the gauge hierarchy problem is a…
We examine the consequences of a universe with a non-constant cosmological term in Einstein's equations and find that the Bianchi identities reduce to the first law of thermodynamics when cosmological term is identified as being…
A modern assessment of the classical Boltzmann-Schuetz argument for large-scale entropy fluctuations as the origin of our observable cosmological domain is given. The emphasis is put on the central implication of this picture which flatly…
After a discussion on several limiting cases where General Relativity turns into less sophisticated theories, we find that in the correct thermodynamical and cosmological weak field limit of Einstein's field equations the entropy of the…
Fractional cosmology modifies the standard derivative to Caputo's fractional derivative of order $\mu$, generating changes in General Relativity. Friedmann equations are modified, and the evolution of the species densities depends on $\mu$…
We revisit anthropic arguments purporting to explain the measured value of the cosmological constant. We argue that different ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an…
We constrain the thermal evolution of the universe with a decaying cosmological term by using the method of the analysis for the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) observation data. The cosmological term is assumed to be a function…
The most exciting future observation in cosmology will feature a monitoring of the cosmic expansion in real time, unlike anything that has ever been attempted before. This campaign will uncover crucial physical properties of the various…
The age of the universe in the Big Bang model can be calculated from three parameters: Hubble's constant, h; the mass density of the universe, Omega_m; and the cosmological constant, Omega_lambda. Recent observations of the cosmic microwave…
We question the global universe isotropy by probing the alignment of local structures in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The original method proposed relies on a steerable wavelet decomposition of the CMB signal on the…
Arguably our current cosmological paradigm, the so-called $\Lambda$CDM `concordance model', faces an existential crisis. This has largely been brought about by its reliance on the twin concepts of dark matter and dark energy, and the…
It is often assumed that in the course of the evolution of the universe, the dark energy either vanishes or becomes a positive constant. However, recently it was shown that in many models based on supergravity, the dark energy eventually…
We use data from observational cosmology to put constraints on higher-dimensional extensions of general relativity in which the effective four-dimensional dark-energy density (or cosmological "constant") decays with time. In particular we…
Many cosmological models assume or imply that the total size of the universe is very large, perhaps even infinite. Here we argue instead that the universe might be comparatively small, in fact not much larger than the currently observed…
The discovery ten years ago that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating put in place the present cosmological model, in which the Universe is composed of 4% baryons, 20% dark matter, and 76% dark energy. Yet the underlying cause of…
A local void in the globally Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmological model with the critical density ($\Omega_{0}=1$) is studied. The inhomogeneity is described using a Lema\^{\i}tre-Tolman-Bondi solution for a spherically symmetric…
Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity -- and possible other intelligent…