Related papers: Big Bang Cosmology and Religious Thought
The exactly solvable quantum model of the homogeneous, isotropic and closed universe in the matter-energy production epoch is considered. It is assumed that the universe is originally filled with a uniform scalar field and a perfect fluid…
The standard big bang cosmology has been greatly successful in explaining many observational aspects of the real universe. However, two particular diffficulties faced by it are the so-called ``horizon'' and ``flatness'' problems. By…
What are the important unanswered questions in cosmology? The choice as to which are the most important is somewhat personal. In the view of the author, the ten topics chosen here for discussion must be included among the most fundamental.…
Big bang of the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW)-brane universe is studied. In contrast to the spacelike initial singularity of the usual FRW universe, the initial singularity of the FRW-brane universe is point-like from the viewpoint of…
Monotheistic religions such as Judaism and Christianity affirm that God loves all humans and created them in His image. However, we have learned from Darwin that we were not created separately from other life on earth. Some Christians…
Super-high energy corpuscular and gamma rays as well as cosmic high--power density sources are hard to explain in a galaxy model framework. Attempts to include some of those phenomena in the Standard Cosmological Model also encounter…
The separate contributions to cosmology of the above researchers are revisited and a cosmology encompassing their basic ideas is proposed. We study Dirac's article on the large number hypothesis (1938), Sciama's proposal of realizing Mach's…
In cosmology, we would like to explain our observations and predict future observations from theories of the entire universe. Such cosmological theories make ontological assumptions of what entities exist and what their properties and…
This article looks at philosophical aspects and questions that modern astrophysical research gives rise to. Other than cosmology, astrophysics particularly deals with understanding phenomena and processes operating at "intermediate" cosmic…
The Cosmological Principle, which states that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic (when averaged on large scales), is the foundational assumption of Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) cosmologies such as the current standard…
On December 31 2022, the Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), the national public-service broadcaster for the Flemish Community of Belgium, recovered a video recording of a 1964 interview of Georges Lema\^itre. Up until now,…
The standard big bang cosmological model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions are summarized. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with…
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), along with the cosmic background radiation and the Hubble expansion, is one of the pillars ofthe standard, hot, big bang cosmology since the primordial synthesis of the light nuclides (D, $^3$He, $^4$He,…
Ancient origins of a modern anthropic argument against cosmologies involving infinite series of past events are considered. It is shown that this argument - which in modern times has been put forward by distinguished cosmologists like Paul…
In 1686 in his Discours de Metaphysique, Leibniz points out that if an arbitrarily complex theory is permitted then the notion of "theory" becomes vacuous because there is always a theory. This idea is developed in the modern theory of…
Cosmology has come a long way from being based on a small number of observations to being a data-driven precision science. We discuss the questions "What is observable?", "What in the Universe is knowable?" and "What are the fundamental…
Many physicists have thought that absolute time became otiose with the introduction of Special Relativity. William Lane Craig disagrees and argues that although relativity is empirically adequate within a domain of application, relativity…
Georges Lemaitre introduced the term "phoenix universe" to describe an oscillatory cosmology with alternating periods of gravitational collapse and expansion. This model is ruled out observationally because it requires a supercritical mass…
This meeting is entitled "A Century of Cosmology." But most of the papers being given here are based on work done very recently and there is really no attempt being made to critically review what has taken place in the last 90 or 100 years.…
It is fair to say that the deepest mystery in our understanding of nature is the birth of our universe. Much of the dilemma over the last decades comes from the extraordinarily small probability that the universe started with the high…