Related papers: Comment to the CPT-symmetric Universe: Two possibl…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
The concepts of symmetry and its breakdown are investigated in two different terms according to whether the resulting asymmetry is universal or only obtained for a special configuration: we shall illustrate this by considering in the first…
In a unified picture both inflation and present dynamical dark energy arise from the same scalar field. The history of the Universe describes a crossover from a scale invariant "past fixed point" where all particles are massless, to a…
When the difference between changes in energy and entropy at a given temperature is correlated with the ratio between the same changes in energy and entropy at zero average free energy of an ensemble of similar but distinct molecule-sized…
After a brief review of the cosmological lithium problem, we report a few recent attempts to find theoretical solutions by our group at Texas A&M University (Commerce & College Station). We will discuss our studies on the theoretical…
The Hamiltonian of an evolving Universe is shown to be formally equivalent to that of a driven quantum system, whose driving follows from the temporal dependence of the spacetime metric. This analogy allows insights from the field of driven…
The recent observational evidence for the acceleration of the universe demonstrates that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete - if not incorrect - and that new physics is out there, waiting to be discovered.…
The accelerated expansion of the universe is the most debatable cosmological scenario in the last two decades. Looking for the proper explanation of this scenario, researchers have presented a lot of proposals to discuss it. However,…
We consider an alternative scenario of inflation which can account for a spatially open universe. It is similar to the old inflation in which the bubble nucleation occurs in the sea of false vacuum, but differs from it in that the second…
By considering (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics as it is done in practice in particular in condensed-matter physics, it is argued that a deterministic, unitary time evolution within a chosen Hilbert space always has a limited scope,…
The pre--big bang cosmological scenario is studied within the context of the Brans--Dicke theory of gravity. An epoch of superinflationary expansion may occur in the pre--big bang phase of the Universe's history in a certain region of…
We consider the de Sitter cosmology deformed by the presence of a thermal bath of radiation and/or time-dependent moduli fields. Depending on the parameters, either a first or second order phase transition can occur. In the first case, an…
This article gives a brief qualitative description of the possible evolution of the early Universe between the end of an inflationary epoch and the end of Big Bang nucleosynthesis. After a general introduction, establishing the minimum…
The early universe according to the big bang and the grand unified theories is discussed. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay…
On the orthodox interpretation of bounce cosmologies, a preceding universe was compressed to a small size before ``bouncing'' to form the present expanding universe. William Lane Craig and James Sinclair have argued that the orthodox…
The Hubble expansion of galaxies, the $2.73\dK$ blackbody radiation background and the cosmic abundances of the light elements argue for a hot, dense origin of the universe --- the standard Big Bang cosmology --- and enable its evolution to…
Recently it has been suggested that non-gaussian inflationary perturbations can be usefully analysed in terms of a putative dual gauge theory defined on the future conformal infinity generated by an accelerating cosmology. The problem is…
It seems generic to have vacua with lower dimensionality than ours. We consider the possibility that the observable universe originated in a transition from one of these vacua. Such a universe has anisotropic spatial curvature. This may be…
Time directions are not invariant in conventional thermodynamics. We broadly follow ideas of Ludwig Boltzmann and investigate implications of postulating time-directional invariance in thermodynamics. In this investigation, we require that…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is well understood under equilibrium conditions as a consequence of the singularity of the thermodynamic limit. How a single global orientation of the order parameter dynamically emerges from an initially…