Related papers: The Universe, the Cold War, and Dialectical Materi…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
Inflationary cosmology explains the homogeneity and large-scale structure of the universe through a brief epoch of accelerated expansion following the Big Bang. Cyclic cosmologies, in contrast, describe a universe undergoing successive…
Cosmology is undergoing an explosive period of activity, fueled both by new, accurate astrophysical data and by innovative theoretical developments. Cosmological parameters such as the total density of the Universe and the rate of…
From a modern perspective cosmology is a historical science in so far that it deals with the development of the universe since its origin some 14 billion years ago. The origin itself may not be subject to scientific analysis and…
Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern…
Since the emergence in the late 1960s of the standard hot big-bang theory, cosmology has been dominated by finite-age models. However, the rival view that the universe has existed for an indefinite time has continued to be defended by a…
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.…
For most of its history, cosmology was a qualitatively constrained discourse on the universe, shaped by limited observational access and the absence of global dynamical laws. This situation has changed decisively in recent decades. Modern…
The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
Scientific cosmology has now reached its period of maturity with the establishment of a standard model, which is the theory of an expanding universe. The question of whether this expansion resolves itself, in the past, into a singularity…
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…
Over the past decades, advancements in observational cosmology have introduced us in an era of precision cosmology, dramatically enhancing our understanding of the Universe's history as well as bringing new tensions to light. Observations…
Observational astronomy has shown significant growth over the last decade and has made important contributions to cosmology. A major paradigm shift in cosmology was brought about by observations of Type Ia supernovae. The notion that the…
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…
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…
Astronomy can never be a hard core physics discipline, because the Universe offers no control experiment, i.e. with no independent checks it is bound to be highly ambiguous and degenerate. Thus e.g. while superluminal motion can be…
The comparison of the Standard Cosmological Model (SCM) with astronomical observations, i.e. theory versus experiment, and with the Minimal Standard Model (MSM) in particle physics, i.e. theory versus theory, is discussed. The main issue of…
The current state of cosmology is easy to summarize: a very successful standard model -- the hot big-bang cosmology -- that accounts for the evolution of the Universe from 10^{-2} sec until the present; bold ideas based upon early-Universe…
For two decades the hot big-bang model as 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 answered by the standard cosmology and…