Related papers: Towards a More Well-Founded Cosmology
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
Inflationary cosmology has become one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. Inflation was the first theory within which it was possible to make predictions about the structure of the Universe on large scales, based on causal physics. The…
The scientific status of physical cosmology has been the subject of philosophical debate ever since detailed mathematical models of the Universe emerged from Einstein's general theory of relativity. Such debates have revolved around whether…
It is only human nature to be reluctant to accept something new and different. This feeling is exacerbated given the success of the Big Bang model. However, there are cogent reasons for considering this new model. Some of the advantages of…
A popular science article designed to introduce people familiar with basic cosmological nomenclature with models alternative to cosmological inflation. The paper briefly discusses the modern view of the Big Bang model, inflation (both its…
A generalized quintessence model is presented which corresponds to a richer vacuum structure that, besides a time-dependent, slowly varying scalar field, contains a varying cosmological term. From first principles we determine a number of…
The early universe according to the big bang and the grand unified theories is discussed. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay…
Over the past century, rooted in the theory of general relativity, cosmology has developed a very successful physical model of the universe: the {\em big-bang model}. Its construction followed different stages to incorporate nuclear…
Fundamental physics today is best defined operationally: it is the program of identifying the microscopic degrees of freedom, symmetries, and dynamical laws that (i) reproduce the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, General Relativity…
With the beginning of the XXIst century, a physical model of our Universe, usually called the Standard Cosmological Model (SCM), is reaching an important level of consolidation, based on accurate astrophysical data and also on theoretical…
This is a very comprehensible review of some key issues in Modern Cosmology. Simple mathematical examples and analogies are always used, whenever available. The starting point is the well know Big Bang Cosmology (BBC). We deal with the…
We trace the origin of the cosmological constant problem to the assumption that Newton's constant $G$ sets the scale for cosmology. And then we show that once this assumption is relaxed, the very same cosmic acceleration which has served to…
It is a fact that the universe lives on a Gravitational Wave Background (GWB), which it may be in the form of extra energy, which is not contained in Einstein's field equations. In \cite{Matos:2021jef}, a new model was developed to explain…
Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible - i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically…
The network of cosmological tests is tight enough now to show that the relativistic Big Bang cosmology is a good approximation to what happened as the universe expanded and cooled through light element production and evolved to the present.…
Inflation is a bold and expansive extension of the Standard Cosmology. It holds the promise to extend our understanding of the Universe to within 10^{-32}sec of the big bang and answer most of the pressing questions in cosmology. Its…
Some remarkable examples of alternative cosmological theories are reviewed here, ranging from a compilation of variations on the Standard Model through the more distant quasi-steady-state cosmology, plasma cosmology, or universe models as a…
The Cosmological Principle (CP) -- the notion that the Universe is spatially isotropic and homogeneous on large scales -- underlies a century of progress in cosmology. It is conventionally formulated through 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,…
Super-high energy corpuscular and gamma rays as well as cosmic high--power density sources are hard to explain in a galaxy model framework. Attempts to include some of those phenomena in the Standard Cosmological Model also encounter…