Related papers: The infinite turn and speculative explanations in …
High energy physics features many ingenious tools for extracting finite results from formally divergent expressions. This brief note argues from a new perspective that all such formal infinities are meaningful markers of new physics. As…
If the universe is infinite now it has always been infinite. This is the opinion of many astronomers today as can be concluded from the following series of interviews, but the opinions differ much more than I had expected. Many astronomers…
The concept of infinity took centuries to achieve recognized status in the field of mathematics, despite the fact that it was implicitly present in nearly all mathematical endeavors. Here I explore the idea that a similar development might…
Conventional thinking says the universe is infinite. But it could be finite and relatively small, merely giving the illusion of a greater one, like a hall of mirrors. Recent astronomical measurements add support to a finite space with a…
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…
Cosmology today is confronted with several seemingly insoluble puzzles and strange, inexplicable coincidences. But a careful re-examination of the Cosmological principle and the Weyl postulate, foundational elements in this subject,…
It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…
The notions of potential infinity (understood as expressing a direction) and actual infinity (expressing a quantity) are investigated. It is shown that the notion of actual infinity is inconsistent, because the set of all (finite) natural…
Observational cosmology is on the verge of new discoveries that will change the essence of our world-view. The matter concerns origin of initial conditions and physics of dark matter.
In which a review of the concept of countability is done in mathematics, subjecting review some of the theorems so far accepted, showing their inconsistency and also taking concrete elements on the countability of all the powers of the set…
Does inflation provide a compelling explanation for why the universe is so large, so flat, and so old, and a predictive theory of density perturbations? In this brief contribution (based on the role of the author as moderator of the…
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.…
What do we do when cosmology raises questions it cannot answer? These include the existence of a multiverse and the universality of the laws of physics. We cannot settle any of these issues by experiment, and this is where philosophers…
We present an elementary account of mathematical cosmology through a series of important unsolved problems. We introduce the fundamental notion of `a cosmology' and focus on the issue of singularities as a theme unifying many current,…
In these lectures I focus on early universe models which can explain the currently observed structure on large scales. I begin with a survey of inflationary cosmology, the current paradigm for understanding the origin of the universe as we…
Some contemporary views of the universe assume information and computation to be key in understanding and explaining the basic structure underpinning physical reality. We introduce the Computable Universe exploring some of the basic…
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.…
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…
Loop quantum cosmology is a conflicted field in which exuberant claims of observability coexist with serious objections against the conceptual and physical viability of its current formulations. This contribution presents a non-technical…
This paper is intended to offer a pedagogical treatment of cosmological modeling and inflationary cosmology. In recent years, inflation has become accepted as a standard scenario making predictions that are testable by observations of the…