Related papers: Astronomy and the Fifth Dimension
The latest astrophysical data on the Supernova luminosity--distance -- redshift relations, primordial nucleosynthesis, value of Cosmic Microwave Background--temperature, and baryon asymmetry are considered as an evidence of relative…
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…
The accelerating universe is closely related to today's version of the cosmological constant problem; fine-tuning and coincidence problems. We show how successfully the scalar-tensor theory, a rather rigid theoretical idea, provides us with…
Recent astronomical observations verify the new scenario resulting from new conservation laws and a new relativity principle fixed either by dual properties of light or by new gravitational (G) tests and the Einstein's equivalence…
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…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
It is very likely that the quantum description of spacetime is quite different from what we perceive at large scales, $l\gg (G\hbar/c^3)^{1/2}$. The long wave length description of spacetime, based on Einstein's equations, is similar to the…
By using an unmodified Einstein gravity theory it is shown that all of the speeding-up effects taking place in the current universe are entirely due to the quantum effects associated with the background radiation or to the combination of…
Special relativity turns out to be more than coordinate transformations in which the constancy of the speed of light plays the central role between two inertial reference frames. Special relativity, in essence, is a theory of…
Here, we present a simple solution to problems that have plagued (extra)"galactic" astronomers and cosmologists over the last century. We show that "galaxy" formation, dark matter, and the tension in the expansion of the universe can all be…
As a scientific discipline, Astronomy is rather unique. We only have one laboratory, the Universe, and we cannot, of course, change the initial conditions and study the resulting effects. On top of this, acquiring Astronomical data has…
In general relativity, only relative acceleration has an observer-independend meaning: curvature and non-gravitational forces determine the rate at which world lines of test bodies diverge or converge. We derive the equations governing both…
The modern usage of the words astronomy and astrology is traced back to distinctions, largely ignored in recent scholarship. Three interpretations of celestial phenomena (in a geometric, a substantialist and a prognostic versions) coexisted…
Deflection of light by gravity was predicted by General Relativity and observationaly confirmed in 1919. In the following decades various aspects of the gravitational lens effect were explored theoretically, among them the possibility of…
The analysis of the data from the distant supernovae (A.Riess et al, Astron.J. {\bf 116}, 1009, (1988)) for acceleration of the expending Universe from the viewpoint of the gravitation equations proposed by one of the authors (Phys.Lett.…
Many physicists, following Einstein, believe that the ultimate aim of theoretical physics is to find a unified theory of all interactions which would not depend on any free dimensionless constant, i.e., a dimensionless constant that is only…
Einstein established the theory of general relativity and the corresponding field equation in 1915 and its vacuum solutions were obtained by Schwarzschild and Kerr for, respectively, static and rotating black holes, in 1916 and 1963,…
There is no mysterious link between mathematics and physics, because both of them are human inventions designed to study the world.
The belief that three dimensional space is infinite and flat in the absence of matter is a canon of physics that has been in place since the time of Newton. The assumption that space is flat at infinity has guided several modern physical…
The basic idea that gravity can be a long-wavelength effect {\it induced} by the peculiar ground state of an underlying quantum field theory leads to consider the implications of spontaneous symmetry breaking through an elementary scalar…