Related papers: Defending The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning
We propose a new dark energy model for solving the cosmological fine-tuning and coincidence problems. A default assumption is that the fine-tuning problem disappears if we do not interpret dark energy as vacuum energy. The key idea to…
Bayesian model averaging is a procedure to obtain parameter constraints that account for the uncertainty about the correct cosmological model. We use recent cosmological observations and Bayesian model averaging to derive tight limits on…
The fact that life has evolved in our universe constrains the laws of physics. The anthropic principle proposes that these constraints are sometimes very tight and can be used to explain in a sense the corresponding laws. Recently a…
In the present article we have investigated a very natural question regarding the dynamics of the universe, namely, the possibility of its decelerating phase immediately after the present accelerating phase. To begin with, we have focused…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
The standard big bang cosmology has been greatly successful in explaining many observational aspects of the real universe. However, two particular diffficulties faced by it are the so-called ``horizon'' and ``flatness'' problems. By…
This paper argues that the physics of condensed matter cannot be fully reduced to the supposedly fundamental quantum mechanical theory for all the atoms of which the system consists. In fact, there are many reasons to reject the idea that…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
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…
If the results of the first LHC run are not betraying us, many decades of particle physics are culminating in a complete and consistent theory for all non-gravitational physics: the Standard Model. But despite this monumental achievement…
There is compelling evidence that the Universe is undergoing a late phase of accelerated expansion. One of the simplest explanations for this behaviour is the presence of dark energy. A plethora of microphysical models for dark energy have…
We examine the fractal structure of the physical universe from the large scale to the smallest scale, including the phenomenon of fractal scaling. This is explained in terms of a stochastic underpinning for the laws of physics. A picture in…
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…
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…
In a previous work [1], it was speculated that the lack of homogeneity of the large-scale structure of the universe may be due to quantum fluctuations of space in the early universe. In [1], this was argued for a Friedmann-type universe for…
Over the last decades, observations with increasing quality have revolutionized our understanding of the general properties of the Universe. Questions posed for millenia by mankind about the origin, evolution and structure of the cosmos…
Possibility to establish macroscopic phenomenological theory for biological systems, akin to the akin to the well-established framework of thermodynamics, is briefly reviewed. We introduce the concept of an evolutionary fluctuation-response…
It is quite remarkable that seventy years after Hubble discovered the expansion of the Universe, we still have no idea in which of the three Friedmann-Robertson-Walker geometries we live. Most of the current literature has focussed on flat…
The present thesis is devoted to the non-parametric reconstruction of some cosmological parameters using diverse observational datasets. The Universe is assumed to be spatially homogeneous and isotropic, thus described by the FLRW metric.…
I shall present three arguments for the proposition that intelligent life is very rare in the universe. First, I shall summarize the consensus opinion of the founders of the Modern Synthesis (Simpson, Dobzhanski, and Mayr) that the…