Related papers: Early publications about nonzero cosmological cons…
The discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating has been followed by an intense theoretical and experimental response in physics and astronomy. The discovery implies that our most basic notions about how gravity work are violated on…
We show how the scalar field, a candidate of quintessence, in a proposed model of the scalar-tensor theories of gravity provides a way to understand a small but nonzero cosmological constant as indicated by recent observations. A particular…
I consider the relation of explanations for the observed data to testability in the following contexts: observational and experimental detection of dark matter; observational and experimental detection of dark energy or a cosmological…
After reviewing the cosmological constant problem - why is Lambda not huge? - I outline the two basic approaches that had emerged by the late 1980s, and note that each made a clear prediction. Precision cosmological experiments now indicate…
Cosmology contributes a good deal to the investigation of variation of fundamental physical constants. High resolution data is available and allows for detailed analysis over cosmological distances and a multitude of methods were developed.…
This talk describes an analytic calculation of the position of the first accoustic peak as a function of the matter density and the cosmological constant (work with Y.J. Ng and R. Rohm), agreeing with independent numerical studies. There is…
Cosmology is operating now on a well established and tightly constraining empirical basis. The relativistic LambdaCDM hot big bang theory is consistent with all the present tests; it has become the benchmark. But the many open issues in…
This contribution reviews recent work on a new approach to the cosmological constant problem, which starts from the macroscopic behavior of a conserved relativistic microscopic variable q. First, the statics of the vacuum energy density is…
For two decades the hot big-bang model has been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not addressed by the standard cosmology and…
In the early-mid 20$^{\rm th}$ century Dirac and Zel'dovich were among the first scientists to suggest an intimate connection between cosmology and atomic physics. Though a revolutionary proposal for its time, Dirac's Large Number…
Analysed in the framework of homogeneous FLRW models, the magnitude-redshift data from high redshift supernovae yield, as a primary result, a strictly positive cosmological constant. Another reading of the currently published measurements…
Today, both particle physics and cosmology are described by few parameter Standard Models, i.e. it is possible to deduce consequence of particle physics in cosmology and vice verse. The former is examined in this lecture, in light of the…
This lecture note presents a survey of the current status of the determination of the three cosmological parameters, the Hubble constant, the mass density paramater and the cosmological constant, to the closing date of the end of November…
The cosmological constant is normally introduced as an additional term entering the Einstein-Hilbert (EH) action. In this letter we demonstrate that instead, it appears naturally from the standard EH action as an invariant term emerging…
Normalizing the Einstein-Hilbert action by the volume functional makes the theory invariant under constant shifts in the Lagrangian. The associated field equations then resemble unimodular gravity whose otherwise arbitrary cosmological…
In 1998 astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Somehow, something must have made gravity repulsive on cosmological scales. This something was called dark energy; it is described by Einstein's cosmological…
We point out that for a large class of universes, holography implies that the most probable value of the cosmological constant is zero. In four spacetime dimensions, the probability distribution takes the Baum-Hawking form,…
We investigate anisotropic fluid cosmology in a situation where the spacetime metric back-reacts in a local, time-dependent way to the presence of inhomogeneities. We derive exact solutions to the Einstein field equations describing…
The discovery of cosmic rays, a milestone in science, was based on the work by scientists in Europe and the New World and took place during a period characterised by nationalism and lack of communication. Many scientists that took part in…
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 has been awarded to John Clarke, John Martinis, and Michel Devoret for "the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit". Their achievements open up…