Related papers: The Great Debate
In the standard model of cosmology, the Universe began its expansion with an anomalously low entropy, which then grew dramatically to much larger values consistent with the physical conditions at decoupling, roughly 380,000 years after the…
The changes of main paradigms on the structure and evolution of the Universe are reviewed. Two puzzles of the modern cosmology, the mean density of matter and the regularity of the Universe on large scales, as well as the possibility to…
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…
This book is a philosopher's introduction to the idea that our universe is just one of many universes. I present and assess three versions of the idea: one version from philosophy, and two from physics. In short, they are: all the logically…
Research over the past 25 years has led to the view that the rich tapestry of present-day cosmic structure arose during the first instants of creation, where weak ripples were imposed on the otherwise uniform and rapidly expanding…
This paper argues that Tycho Brahe's "principal argument against Copernicus" (as the astronomer Christiaan Huygens called it) likely derived from a much older argument regarding the sizes of the "two great lights" described in the first…
In 1919 A. Einstein suspected first that gravitational fields could play an essential role in the structure of elementary particles. In 1937, P.A.M. Dirac found a miraculous link between the properties of the visible Universe and elementary…
In this two-part paper, we review, and then develop, the assessment of the hole argument for general relativity. This first Part reviews the literature hitherto, focussing on the philosophical aspects. It also introduces two main ideas we…
Part 1 : For more than two millennia, ever since Euclid's geometry, the so called Archimedean Axiom has been accepted without sufficiently explicit awareness of that fact. The effect has been a severe restriction of our views of space-time,…
``One could imagine that as a result of enormously extended astronomical experience, the entire universe consists of countless identical copies of our Milky Way, that the infinite space can be partitioned into cubes each containing an…
Einstein's blackboard is a well-known exhibit at the History of Science Museum at Oxford University. However, it is much less well known that the writing on the board provides a neat summary of a work of historic importance, Einstein's 1931…
An introductory account is given of the understanding of the structure of the universe. At present the most plausible theory of the origin of the universe is that it formed from the explosion of an extremely hot and dense fireball several…
If our universe has appeared in a result of Big Bang or something like this, whether we have reasons to deny an existence of other universes appearing by the same or similar way? An objection that there is no anything like it, is doubtful,…
Invited talk delivered at the International Conference on General Relativity and Cosmology (ICGC), Ahmedabad, India; 13 - 18 December 1991. To appear in its proceedings.
What does ``Big Bang" mean? What was the actual origin of these two words? There are many aspects hidden under this name, which are seldom explained. They are discussed here. To frame the analysis, help will be sought from the highly…
The topic of this conference is ``The Chaotic Universe''. One of the main achievements of last century has been to relate chaos in fluids to their thermodynamics. It is our purpose to make connection between chaos in gravitation and…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
We propose a new approach to the model of an origin of the universe built by Oscar Klein and Hannes Alfv\'{e}n. Some modifications of assumptions underlying the model result in a possible scenario of the universe creation consistent with…
This contribution is the affirmative side of a debate held with Dr. L. Pietronero at Princeton in June, 1996. I present the observational evidence that the fractal behavior which characterizes the small scale galaxy distribution does not…
Every society has a story rooted in its most ancient traditions, of how the earth and sky originated. Most of these stories attribute the origin of all things to a Creator - whether God, Element or Idea. We first recall that in the Western…