Related papers: The Case Against Cosmology
This paper is intended to offer a pedagogical treatment of cosmological modeling and inflationary cosmology. In recent years, inflation has become accepted as a standard scenario making predictions that are testable by observations of the…
The question of the nature of galaxy clustering and the possible homogeneity of galaxy distribution is one of the fundamental problem of cosmology. It is well established that galaxy structures are characterized, up to a certain scale, by…
The (re)introduction of $\Lambda$ into cosmology has spurred debates that touch on central questions in philosophy of science, as well as the foundations of general relativity and particle physics. We provide a systematic assessment of the…
Observations of the cosmic microwave background represent a remarkable source of information for modern cosmology. Besides providing impressive support for the Big Bang model itself, they quantify the overall framework, or background, for…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
We review cosmological relativity, a new special theory of relativity that was recently developed for cosmology, and discuss in detail some of its aspects.
Observational cosmology is on the verge of new discoveries that will change the essence of our world-view. The matter concerns origin of initial conditions and physics of dark matter.
One of the main goals of physical cosmology is to reconstruct the expansion history of the universe and finding the actual model of dark energy. In this article I review the difficulties of understanding dark energy and discuss about two…
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…
Cosmology is very exciting for three reasons. There is a very successful standard model - the hot big bang - which describes the evolution of the Universe from 10^{-2} sec onward. There are bold ideas, foremost among them are inflation and…
The past few years have seen several breakthroughs in particle astrophysics and cosmology. In several cases, new observations can only be explained with the introduction of new fundamental physics. In this talk I summarize some of these…
There has been a recent spate of papers on the Cosmic Horizon, an apparently fundamental, although unrecognised, property of the universe. The misunderstanding of this horizon, it is claimed, demonstrates that our determination of the…
The actual existence of collections of universes -- multiverses -- is strongly suggested by leading approaches to quantum cosmology, and has been proposed earlier as an attractive way to explain the apparent fine-tuned character of our…
I discuss some central issues in particle physics which are potentially relevant to cosmology. I first briefly review the present (glorious) experimental status of the Standard Model, emphasizing that it provides a firm foundation both for…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
We re-examine claims that anthropic arguments provide an explanation for the observed smallness of the cosmological constant, and argue that correlations between the cosmological constant value and the existence of life can be demonstrated…
This article gives an overview, aimed at theoretical particle physicists, of some recent developments in cosmology.
The averaging problem in cosmology is of considerable importance for the correct interpretation of cosmological data. We review cosmological observations and discuss some of the issues regarding averaging. We present a precise definition of…
(Abridged) Cosmology faces three distinct challenges in the next decade. (1) The dark sector, both dark matter and dark energy, dominates the Universe. Key questions include determining the nature of both. Improved observational probes are…
I motivate and discuss some recent work on theories with varying constants, and consider some possible observational consequences and tests. Particular emphasis is given to models which can (almost) exactly mimic the predictions of standard…