Related papers: From Cosmology to Cosmonomy
We are at a specific period of modern cosmology, during which the large increase of the amount of data leads to the idea that the determination of cosmological parameters has been achieved with a rather good precision. There is a large…
Cosmic voids, the large underdense regions of our Universe, have emerged over the past decade as powerful cosmological laboratories: their simple dynamics, sensitivity to local gravitational effects and cosmic expansion, and ability to span…
Whether we live in a spatially finite universe, and what its shape and size may be, are among the fundamental long-standing questions in cosmology. These questions of topological nature have become particularly topical, given the wealth of…
The discovery of cosmic acceleration is one of the most important developments in modern cosmology. The observation, thirteen years ago, that type Ia supernovae appear dimmer that they would have been in a decelerating universe followed by…
Loop quantum cosmology is an application of recent developments for a non-perturbative and background independent quantization of gravity to a cosmological setting. Characteristic properties of the quantization such as discreteness of…
Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern…
In the early seventies, Alan Sandage defined cosmology as the search for two numbers: Hubble parameter ${{H}_{0}}$ and deceleration parameter ${{q}_{0}}$. The first of the two basic cosmological parameters (the Hubble parameter) describes…
The extreme luminosity and their fairly unique temporal behaviour have made supernovae a superb tool to measure distances in the universe. As complex astrophysical events they provide interesting insights into explosion physics, explosive…
The comparison of the Standard Cosmological Model (SCM) with astronomical observations, i.e. theory versus experiment, and with the Minimal Standard Model (MSM) in particle physics, i.e. theory versus theory, is discussed. The main issue of…
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…
Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has grappled with the big questions of existence and creation. Modern cosmology seeks to answer some of these questions using a combination of mathematics and measurement. The questions people hope…
Influenced by the renaissance of general relativity that came to pass in the 1950s, the character of cosmology fundamentally changed in the 1960s as it became a well-established empirical science. Although observations went to dominate its…
We investigate the observational tests of generalized mass-to-horizon entropic cosmology by incorporating large-scale structure growth data in addition to purely geometric probes. The theoretical framework is constructed from a generalized…
This article is the written version of the closing talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Italy, in August 2007. I focus on the prospects of constraining fundamental physics from cosmological…
The last 20 years have seen an explosion in our understanding of the large-scale distribution and motions of galaxies in the nearby universe. The field has moved from a largely qualitative, morphological description of the structures seen…
A review of the principles of observational testing of cosmological theories is given with a special emphasis on the distinction between observational facts and theoretical hypotheses. A classification of modern cosmological theories and…
A cosmological model is formulated in the context of a scalar-tensor theory of gravity in which the entire cosmic background evolution is due to a complex scalar field evolving in Minkowski spacetime, such that its (dimensional) modulus is…
First, this paper broaches the definition of science and the epistemic yield of tenets and approaches: phenomenological (descriptive only), well-founded (solid first principles, conducive to deep understanding), provisional (falsifiable if…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
There has been significant recent progress in observational cosmology. This, in turn, has provided an unprecedented picture of the early universe and its evolution. In this review I will present a (biased) view of how one can use these…