Related papers: The infinite turn and speculative explanations in …
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Valid ideas that physical reality is vastly larger than human perception of it, and that the perceived part may not be representative of the whole, exist on many levels and have a long history. After a brief general inventory of those ideas…
We review some aspects of quantum gravity in the context of cosmology. In particular, we focus on models with a phenomenology accessible to current and near-future observations, as the early Universe might be our only chance to peep through…
``One could imagine that as a result of enormously extended astronomical experience, the entire universe consists of countless identical copies of our Milky Way, that the infinite space can be partitioned into cubes each containing an…
What is the shape of the Universe? Is it curved or flat, finite or infinite ? Is space "wrapped around" to create ghost images of faraway cosmic sources? We review how tessellations allow to build multiply-connected 3D Riemannian spaces…
Discussions on indeterminism in physics focus on the possibility of an open future, i.e. the possibility of having potential alternative future events, the realisation of one of which is not fully determined by the present state of affairs.…
The widely accepted description of the present cosmic acceleration and the neutrino oscillations in terms of a cosmological constant and neutrino masses, respectively, seems conceptually not very satisfactory. From a phenomenological…
The best mathematical arguments against a realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics - that gives definite but partially unknown values to all observables - are analysed and shown to be based on reasoning that is not compelling. This…
There have been recent attempts at justifying, from first principles, and within the standard framework, the emergence of classical behavior in the post-inflationary cosmological context. Accounting for this emergence is an important issue,…
This paper explores the evolution of the so called "anthropic reasoning" in a historical perspective. It takes under scrutiny the appearance of "anthropic" considerations in various stages of modern cosmology, focusing also on some very…
Loop quantum cosmology is an application of recent developments for a non-perturbative and background independent quantization of gravity to a cosmological setting. Characteristic properties of the quantization such as discreteness of…
Infinite sequences are considered in the framework of classical logic from a new point of view.
The concordance model of cosmology predicts a universe which finishes in a finite amount of conformal time at a future conformal boundary. We show that for particular cases we study, the background variables and perturbations may be…
I summarize the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by…
We examine two far-reaching and somewhat heretic consequences of General Relativity. (i) It requires a cosmology which includes a preferred rest frame, absolute space and time. (ii) A rotating universe and time travel are strict solutions…
We present the model theoretic concepts that allow mathematics to be developed with the notion of the potential infinite instead of the actual infinite. The potential infinite is understood as a dynamic notion, being an indefinitely…
An impressive bulk of multiple astronomical observations indicates that there are plenty of objects in the universe with the age which cannot be explained by the conventional theory. A model is considered which successfully describes all…
An introduction to modern cosmology is given, focusing on theories for the origin of structure in the Universe. After a brief review of the theory of growth of cosmological perturbations and a summary of some important observational…
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…