Related papers: Cosmic Modesty
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…
Physics is facing contingency. Not only in facts but also in laws (the frontier becoming extremely narrow). Cosmic natural selection is a tantalizing idea to explain the apparently highly improbable structure of our Universe. In this brief…
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…
We argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a stupendous opportunity for the Creator of universe our (assuming one exists) to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. Our work does not support the…
We assume that the Universe has a non trivial topology whose compact spatial sections have a volume significantly smaller than the horizon volume. By a topological lens effect, such a "folded" space configuration generates multiple images…
Nature's many complex systems--physical, biological, and cultural--are islands of low-entropy order within increasingly disordered seas of surrounding, high-entropy chaos. Energy is a principal facilitator of the rising complexity of all…
This article provides a popular, largely non-technical explanation of how large objects can behave classically while smaller objects behave quantum mechanically, based on the effect of the presence of cosmic expansion velocities in extended…
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…
Mathematics is one of the ways our species makes sense of this world and I believe that it is inherent in our thinking machinery. The mathematics we do in turn is dependent on the way we view our universe and ourselves. Lakoff and Nunez…
Is the universe computable? If so, it may be much cheaper in terms of information requirements to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply basic concepts of Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible…
One signature of an expanding universe is the time-variation of the cosmological abundances of its different components. For example, a radiation-dominated universe inevitably gives way to a matter-dominated universe, and critical moments…
Large cosmological datasets have been probing the properties of our universe and constraining the parameters of dark matter and dark energy with increasing precision. Deep learning techniques have shown potential to be smarter, and to…
Einstein wrote memorably that `The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.' This paper argues that the universe must be comprehensible at some level for information gathering and utilizing subsystems such…
We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…
The Cosmological Principle states that the universe is both homogeneous and isotropic. This, alone, is not enough to specify the global geometry of the spacetime. If we were able to measure both the Hubble constant and the energy density we…
We define a universe as the contents of a spacetime box with comoving walls, large enough to contain essentially all phenomena that can be conceivably measured. The initial time is taken as the epoch when the lowest CMB modes undergo…
We present a class of graviton-dilaton models which leads to a singularity free evolution of the universe. We study the evolution of a homogeneous isotropic universe. We follow an approach which enables us to analyse the evolution and…
I wish to expound a novel perspective of probing universal character of gravity. To begin with, inclusion of zero mass particle in mechanics leads to special relativity while its interaction with a universal force shared by all particles…
We are told that we are living in a Golden Age of Astronomy. Cosmological Parameters are found with un precedented accuracy. Yet, the known form of matter forms only a small fraction of the total energy density of the universe. Also, a…
The assumption that a complete description of an early state of the universe does not privilege any position or direction in space leads to a unified account of probability in cosmology, macroscopic physics, and quantum mechanics. Such a…