Related papers: Life in a random universe: Sciama's argument recon…
For Lee Smolin, our universe is only one in a much larger cosmos (the Multiverse) - a member of a growing community of universes, each one being born in a bounce following the formation of a black hole. In the course of this, the values of…
The aim of this thesis is to question some of the basic assumptions that go into building the $\Lambda$CDM model of our universe. The assumptions we focus on are the initial conditions of the universe, the fundamental forces in the universe…
Under the assumption that General Relativity (GR) correctly describes the phenomenology of our Universe, astronomical observations provide compelling evidence that (1) the dynamics of cosmic structure is dominated by dark matter (DM), an…
A simple model of a universe is presented composed of black holes and black branes. It uses the most simplest approximations and models of General Relativity and Quantum Dynamics to offer an idea of an unification and gives a possible…
A vast array of transformative technologies developed over the past decade has enabled measurement and perturbation at ever increasing scale, yet our understanding of many systems remains limited by experimental capacity. Overcoming this…
In reference gr-qc/0104036 a four-dimensional effective theory of gravity embeddable in a five-dimensional "distorted" Randall-Sundrum brane scenario was derived. The present paper is aimed at the application of such a theory to describe…
Jim Shapiro synthesizes a great many observations about the mechanisms of evolution to reach the remarkable conclusion that large-scale modification, exchange, and rearrangement of the genome are common and should be viewed as fundamental…
Phantom dark energy models, with w < -1, are characterized by a future singularity and therefore a finite lifetime for the universe. Because the future singularity is triggered by the onset of dark-energy domination, the universe spends a…
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe…
It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…
We review recent work that employs the framework of logical inference to establish a bridge between data gathered through experiments and their objective description in terms of human-made concepts. It is shown that logical inference…
Living organisms survive and multiply even though they have uncertain and incomplete information about their environment and imperfect models to predict the consequences of their actions. Bayesian models have been proposed to face this…
The fate of our universe is an unceasing topic of cosmology and the human being. The discovery of the current accelerated expansion of the universe significantly changed our view of the fate of the universe. Recently, some interesting…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly and indirectly from a large body of observational evidence. The simplest and most theoretically appealing possibility is the vacuum energy density (cosmological constant).…
We present a theoretical as well as experimental investigation of a population of self-replicating segments of code subject to random mutation and survival of the fittest. Under the assumption that such a system constitutes a minimal system…
It is generally considered as self evident that the lifetime of our vacuum in the landscape of string theory cannot be much shorter than the current age of the universe. Here I show why this lower limit is invalid. A certain type of…
This book provides a completely new approach to understanding the universe. The main idea is that the principal objects in the universe form a spectrum unified by the presence of a massive or hypermassive black hole. These objects are…
Living organisms are not just random collections of organic molecules. There is continuous information processing going on in the apparent bouncing around of molecules of life. Optimisation criteria in this information processing can be…
Prediction in quantum cosmology requires a specification of the universe's quantum dynamics and its quantum state. We expect only a few general features of the universe to be predicted with probabilities near unity conditioned on the…