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The standard model of cosmology has provided a good phenomenological description of a wide range of observations both at astrophysical and cosmological scales for several decades. This concordance model is constructed by a universal…
It has become common to call this the "era of precision cosmology," and hence one rarely hears about the finiteness of the amount of information that is available for constraining cosmological parameters. Under the assumption that the…
We have fossil evidence from the thermal background radiation that our universe expanded from a considerably hotter denser state. We have a well defined and testable description of the expansion, the relativistic Friedmann-Lemaitre model.…
This article is the written version of the closing talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Italy, in August 2007. I focus on the prospects of constraining fundamental physics from cosmological…
Cosmic voids constitute promising cosmological laboratories. However, a full description of all the redshift-space effects that affect observational measurements is mandatory in order to obtain unbiased cosmological constraints. We make a…
Facing the advent of the next generation cosmological surveys we present a method to forecast knowledge gain on cosmological models. We propose this as a well defined and general tool to quantify the performance of different experiments in…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
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…
An anthropic understanding of the cosmological constant requires that the vacuum energy at late time scans from one patch of the universe to another. If the vacuum energy during inflation also scans, the various patches of the universe…
I briefly discuss the challenges presented by attempting to modify general relativity to obtain an explanation for the observed accelerated expansion of the universe. Foremost among these are the questions of theoretical consistency - the…
The large scale distribution of galaxies in the universe displays a complex pattern of clusters, super-clusters, filaments and voids with sizes limited only by the boundaries of the available samples. A quantitative statistical…
Cosmological observables rely heavily on summary statistics such as two-point correlation functions. In many practical cases (e.g. the weak-lensing cosmic shear), those correlation functions are estimated from a finite, discrete sample of…
Cosmic voids, the large underdense regions of our Universe, have emerged over the past decade as powerful cosmological laboratories: their simple dynamics, sensitivity to local gravitational effects and cosmic expansion, and ability to span…
The paradigm of \Lambda CDM cosmology works impressively well and with the concept of inflation it explains the universe after the time of decoupling. However there are still a few concerns; after much effort there is no detection of dark…
Observations conducted over the last few decades show that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. In the standard model of cosmology, this accelerated expansion is attributed to a dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant.…
Suppose an astronomer is equipped with a device capable of detecting emissions -- whether they be electromagnetic, gravitational, or neutrino -- from transient sources distributed throughout the cosmos. Because of source rate density…
Cosmic voids are becoming key players in testing the physics of our Universe. Here we concentrate on the abundances and the dynamics of voids as these are among the best candidates to provide information on cosmological parameters. Cai,…
There is mounting observational evidence that the expansion of our Universe is undergoing a late-time acceleration. Among many proposals to describe this phenomenon, the cosmological constant seems to be the simplest and the most natural…
Cosmology has come a long way from being based on a small number of observations to being a data-driven precision science. We discuss the questions "What is observable?", "What in the Universe is knowable?" and "What are the fundamental…
Models of inflationary cosmology can lead to variation of observable parameters ("constants of Nature") on extremely large scales. The question of making probabilistic predictions for today's observables in such models has been investigated…