Related papers: General Relativity and Cosmology: Unsolved Questio…
Gravitation, according to General Relativity, is an attribute of space-time's geometry and hence not a force in the Newtonian sense. This is a consequence of Einstein's equivalence principle, which so far passed all experimental tests with…
General relativity predicts a singularity in the beginning of the universe being called big bang. Recent developments in loop quantum cosmology avoid the singularity and the big bang is replaced by a big bounce. A classical theory of…
This work may be defined as a modern philosophical approach to theoretical physics. Since ancient times science and philosophy evolved in parallel, thus renewing from time to time the epochal paradigms of human thought. We could not…
In 1945 Einstein concluded that [1]: 'The present theory of relativity is based on a division of physical reality into a metric field (gravitation) on the one hand, and into an electromagnetic field and matter on the other hand. In reality…
The theory of general relativity is reformed to a genuine Yang-Mills gauge theory of the Poincar\'e group for gravity. Several pathologies of the conventional theory are thus removed, but not every GR vacuum satisfies the Y-M equations. The…
Special relativity is no longer a new revolutionary theory but a firmly established cornerstone of modern physics. The teaching of special relativity, however, still follows its presentation as it unfolded historically, trying to convince…
Extended Theories of Gravity can be considered a new paradigm to cure shortcomings of General Relativity at infrared and ultraviolet scales. They are an approach that, by preserving the undoubtedly positive results of Einstein's Theory, is…
We construct a consistency test of General Relativity (GR) on cosmological scales. This test enables us to distinguish between the two alternatives to explain the late-time accelerated expansion of the universe, that is, dark energy models…
In Chapter 1 I present the current picture of the universe and briefly review the cosmological constant problem and some of the theories proposed to solve it. The following Chapters essentially contain the published papers with some…
Mach's principle is surely one of those tantalizingly beautiful concepts in physics which remain elusive. Though General Relativity (GR) was conceived in the spirit of realizing it, the theory failed to fulfill this expectation. Here a…
Modern astrophysical and cosmological models are plagued with two severe theoretical difficulties, namely, the dark energy and the dark matter problems. Relative to the former, high-precision observational data have confirmed with startling…
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…
Three theoretical criteria for gravitational theories beyond general relativity are considered: obtaining the cosmological constant as an integration constant, deriving the energy conservation law as a consequence of the field equations,…
I discuss the ontological assumptions and implications of General Relativity. I maintain that General Relativity is a theory about gravitational fields, not about space-time. The latter is a more basic ontological category, that emerges…
Loop Quantum Gravity is a background independent, nonperturbative approach to the quantization of General Relativity. Its application to models of interest in cosmology and astrophysics, known as Loop Quantum Cosmology, has led to new and…
The theoretical framework of cosmology is mainly defined by gravity, of which general relativity is the current model. Recent tests of general relativity within the \Lambda Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model have found a concordance between…
In the standard cosmological theory one uses the Einstein concepts of space and time as were originally introduced for the special theory of relativity and the general relativity theory. According to this approach all physical quantities…
In this essay we offer a comprehensible overview of the gravitational aether scenario. This is a possible extension of Einstein's theory of relativity to the quantum regime via an effective approach. Quantization of gravity usually faces…
Einstein's theory of General Relativity is the benchmark example for empirical success and mathematical elegance in theoretical physics. However, in spite of being the most successfully tested theory in physics, there are strong theoretical…
We show that General Relativity (GR) with cosmological constant may be formulated as a rather simple constrained SO(D-1,2) (or SO(D,1))-Yang-Mills (YM) theory. Furthermore, the spin connections of the Cartan-Einstein formulation for GR…