Related papers: Infinite Growth: A Curse or a Blessing?
Eternal inflation is a seemingly generic consequence of theories that give rise to accelerated expansion of the universe and possess multiple vacuum states. Making predictions in an eternally inflating universe is notoriously difficult…
Discovered almost forty years ago, inflation has become the leading paradigm for the early universe. Originally invented to avoid the fine-tuning puzzles of the standard model of cosmology, the so-called hot Big Bang phase, inflation has…
There is some evidence that the Universe is presently undergoing accelerating expansion. This has restored some credit to the scenarios with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. From the point of view of a theory of fundamental…
This paper is an attempt to formalize analytically the question raised in "World Population Explained: Do Dead People Outnumber Living, Or Vice Versa?" Huffington Post, \cite{HJ}. We start developing simple deterministic Malthusian growth…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
This paper explores the fundamental causal limits on how much of the universe we can observe or affect. It distinguishes four principal regions: the affectable universe, the observable universe, the eventually observable universe, and the…
A more clear-cut answer to the title question is, ``Yes'' if the universal expansion started with a big bang; ``No'' if it started infinitely slowly.
This paper analyzes the equilibrium distribution of wealth in an economy where firms' productivities are subject to idiosyncratic shocks, returns on factors are determined in competitive markets, dynasties have linear consumption functions…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
The cause for the observed acceleration in the expansion of the universe is unknown, and referred to as "dark energy" for convenience. Dark energy could be an unknown energy component, or a modification of Einstein's general relativity.…
We consider the problem of optimal consumption from labor income and investment in a general incomplete semimartingale market. The economic agent cannot borrow against future income, so the total wealth is required to be positive at (all or…
This letter is meant to be a brief survey of several recent publications providing a simple, sequential explanation of Dark Energy, Inflation and Dark Matter, which leads to a simple picture of the why and the how of the Big Bang, and…
This study reviews the advances made in inflationary theory, especially regarding the seeming disparity between inflation energy and dark energy, and their significance to cosmic evolution as a whole. I attempt to connect the two sources of…
We briefly review the properties of radially growing interfaces and their connection to biological growth. We focus on simplified models which result from the abstraction of only considering domain growth and not the interface curvature.…
An introductory account is given of the inflationary cosmology, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the Universe's earliest stages. The historical motivation is briefly outlined, and the modelling of the inflationary…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
In this note, we explicitly solve the problem of maximizing utility of consumption (until the minimum of bankruptcy and the time of death) with a constraint on the probability of lifetime ruin, which can be interpreted as a risk measure on…
Entropy is a very useful concept from physics that tries to explain how a system behaves from a point of view of the thermodynamics. However, there are two ways to explain entropy, and it depends on if we are studying a microsystem or a…