Related papers: Can Cosmology Provide a Test of Quantum Mechanics?
The accelerating expansion of the Universe poses a major challenge to our understanding of fundamental physics. One promising avenue is to modify general relativity and obtain a new description of the gravitational force. Because…
Our current understanding of the Universe is established through the pristine measurements of structure in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the distribution and shapes of galaxies tracing the large scale structure (LSS) of the…
A scenario is outlined for quantum measurement, assuming that self-sustaining classicality is the consequence of an attractive gravitational self-interaction acting on massive bodies, and randomness arises already in the classical domain. A…
In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenge---a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. I then discuss the motivations…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
WE analyse the universe inflation when the source of gravity is electromagnetic fields obeying nonlinear electrodynamics with two parameters and without singularities. The cosmology of the universe with stochastic magnetic fields is…
The "new standard cosmology", based on the theory of inflation, has very impressive observational support. I review some outstanding problems of the new cosmology and the global view of the universe -- the multiverse -- that it suggests. I…
Inflationary cosmology proposes that the early Universe undergoes accelerated expansion, driven, in simple scenarios, by a single scalar field, or inflaton. The form of the inflaton potential determines the initial spectra of density…
In an inhomogeneous universe, an observer associated with a particular matter field does not necessarily measure the same cosmological evolution as an observer in a homogeneous and isotropic universe. Here we consider, in the context of a…
Recently, a new framework for describing the multiverse has been proposed which is based on the principles of quantum mechanics. The framework allows for well-defined predictions, both regarding global properties of the universe and…
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…
The very early universe provides the best arena we currently have to test quantum gravity theories. The success of the inflationary paradigm in accounting for the observed inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background already…
Quantum gravity places entirely new challenges on the formulation of a consistent theory as well as on an extraction of potentially observable effects. Quantum corrections due to the gravitational field are commonly expected to be tiny…
We consider a model of modified gravity from the nonperturbative quantization of a metric. We obtain the modified gravitational field equations and the modified conservational equations. We apply it to the FLRW spacetime and find that due…
Quantum computation teaches us that quantum mechanics exhibits exponential complexity. We argue that the standard scientific paradigm of "predict and verify" cannot be applied to testing quantum mechanics in this limit of high complexity.…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
We propose a holographic description of four-dimensional single-scalar inflationary universes, and show how cosmological observables, such as the primordial power spectrum, are encoded in the correlation functions of a three-dimensional…
The inhomogeneous fluctuations that underlie structure formation - galaxies and CMB hotspots - might have been seeded by quantum cosmological fluctuations, as magnified by some inflationary mechanism. The Halliwell-Hawking model for these,…
Inflationary cosmology has proved to be the most successful at predicting the properties of the anisotropies observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this essay we show that quantum field renormalization significantly…
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…