Related papers: Modern Cosmology: Assumptions and Limits
How did it all begin? Although this question has undoubtedly lingered for as long as humans have walked the Earth, the answer still eludes us. Yet since my grandparents were born, scientists have been able to refine this question to a…
Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity -- and possible other intelligent…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
It is often stated that cosmology is an extreme form of archeology that deals with aeons of time extending back to thousands of millions of years. One talks, for instance, of relics of the early Universe, and phases in the history of the…
Two fundamental laws are needed for prediction in the universe: (1) a basic dynamical law and (2) a law for the cosmological initial condition. Quantum cosmology is the area of basic research concerned with the search for a theory of the…
The main task for cosmology today is the completion of the program of cosmological tests that commenced in the 1930s. I offer comments on the state of the program and the issues to be addressed to establish a convincing large-scale picture…
In this letter we will revise the steps followed by A. Einstein when he first wrote on cosmology from the point of view of the general theory of relativity. We will argue that his insightful line of thought leading to the introduction of…
Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of quantum-scale experiments, the physical interpretations of these theories remain controversial. In this manuscript, we propose a new…
For more than a half century cosmologists have been guided by the assumption that matter is distributed homogeneously on sufficiently large scales. On the other hand, observations have consistently yielded evidence for inhomogeneity in the…
It has long been a primary objective of cosmology to understand the apparent isotropy in our universe and to provide a mathematical formulation for its evolution. A school of thought for its explanation is quiescent cosmology, which already…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
Cosmoparticle physics offers the exciting challenge for the new Millenium to come to the true knowledge on the basic natural laws and on the way, they govern the creation and evolution of the Universe with all the forms of its present…
We investigate the cosmological behavior in a universe governed by time asymmetric extensions of general relativity, which is a novel modified gravity based on the addition of new, time-asymmetric, terms on the Hamiltonian framework, in a…
Quantum cosmology has traditionally been studied at the level of symmetry-reduced minisuperspace models, analyzing the behavior of wave functions. However, in the absence of a complete full setting of quantum gravity and detailed knowledge…
This essay is a nontechnical primer for a broader audience, in which I paint a broad-brush picture of modern cosmology. I begin by reviewing the evidence for the big bang, including the expansion of our Universe, the cosmic microwave…
In quantum cosmology, one applies quantum physics to the whole universe. While no unique version and no completely well-defined theory is available yet, the framework gives rise to interesting conceptual, mathematical and physical…
Inflation predicts that quantum fluctuations determine the large scale structure of the Universe. This raises the striking possibility that quantum mechanics, developed to describe nature at short distances, can be tested by studying nature…
The Universe is a physical object. Physical objects have shapes and sizes. General relativity is insufficient to describe the global shape and size of the Universe: the Hilbert-Einstein equations only treat limiting quantities towards an…
The question of what should be meant by a measurement is tackled from a mathematical perspective whose physical interpretation is that a measurement is a fundamental process via which a finite amount of classical information is produced.…