Related papers: Lessons from Windows on the Universe
Surprisingly, the question "Is there Life in the Universe outside Earth?" has been raised, in rational terms, almost only in the western literature throughout the ages. In a first part I justify this statement. Then I try to develop an…
Cosmological discoveries over the past century have completely changed our picture of our place in the universe. New observations have a realistic chance of probing nature on heretofore unimaginable scales, and as a result are changing the…
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered and the search for life outside Earth is at the forefront of astrophysical research. The planets we observe show a mind-blowing diversity that current theories strive to explain as part of the…
The first part of this lecture quickly touches upon some important but infrequently discussed issues in large extra dimension and warped extra dimension scenarios, with particular reference to effects in the early universe. The second part…
The discovery of a biosphere on another planet would transform how we view ourselves, and our planet Earth, in relation to the rest of the cosmos. We now know Earth is one planet among eight circling our sun; our sun is part of a swirling…
The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe…
Systems thinking is a way of making sense about the world in terms of multilevel, nested, interacting systems, their environment, and the boundaries between the systems and the environment. In this paper we discuss the evolution of systems…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
The idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes or universe domains -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our…
We define a universe as the contents of a spacetime box with comoving walls, large enough to contain essentially all phenomena that can be conceivably measured. The initial time is taken as the epoch when the lowest CMB modes undergo…
Understanding a planet's atmosphere is a necessary condition for understanding not only the planet itself, but also its formation, structure, evolution, and habitability, This puts a premium on obtaining spectra, and developing credible…
These lectures were addressed to nonspecialists willing to learn some basic facts, approaches, tools and observational evidence which conform modern cosmology. The aim is also to try to complement the many excellent treatises that exists on…
In this paper we consider some constraints on brane-world cosmologies. In the first part we analyze different behaviors for the expansion of our universe by imposing constraints on the speed of sound. In the second part, we study the nature…
In this paper we work out a multiverse scenario whose physical characteristics enable us to advance the following the conjecture that whereas the physics of particles and fields is confined to live in the realm of the whole multiverse…
The idea of extra-dimensions has recently gone through a renewal with the hypothesis, suggested by recent developments in string theory, that ordinary matter is confined to a sub-space, called brane, embedded in a higher dimensional…
On the basis that the universe is a closed quantum system with no external observers, we propose a paradigm in which the universe jumps through a series of stages. Each stage is defined by a quantum state, an information content, and rules…
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,…
The expansion of the Universe is the basis of modern cosmology. This chapter outlines the theory behind the expansion of the universe, including the cosmological principle, distances, velocities, and accelerations. We provide basic…
We overview our recent studies of cosmological models with expansion and global rotation. Problems of the early rotating models are discussed, and the class of new viable cosmologies is described in detail. Particular attention is paid to…
We consider the proposition that multiple universes exist by reviewing the various manifestations. In recent years, this idea has been elevated from science fiction and introduced in separate guises as an explanation for coincidence…