Related papers: A Cosmic Perspective from Lapland in 2001
From a modern perspective cosmology is a historical science in so far that it deals with the development of the universe since its origin some 14 billion years ago. The origin itself may not be subject to scientific analysis and…
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…
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.
Over the past three years, our confidence in the inferred values of cosmological parameters has increased dramatically, confirming that the flat matter dominated Universe that dominated cosmological model building for the past 20 years does…
The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe…
For a few years now, cosmology has a standard model. By this term, we mean a consistent theoretical background which is at the same time simple and broad enough to offer coherent explanations for the vast majority of cosmological phenomena.…
We discuss a number of fundamental aspects of modern cosmological concepts, from the phenomenological, observational, theoretical and epistemic points of view. We argue that the modern cosmology, despite a great advent, in particular in the…
Some few hundred million years after the big bang the Universe was illuminated by the first stars and galaxies thereby bringing an end to the cosmological dark ages. Since the installation of WFC3 on the Hubble Space Telescope our ability…
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…
Since the beginning of the 20th century, a continuous evolution and perfection of what we today call the standard cosmological model has been produced, although some authors like to distinguish separate periods within this evolution. A…
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…
Over the last decades, observations with increasing quality have revolutionized our understanding of the general properties of the Universe. Questions posed for millenia by mankind about the origin, evolution and structure of the cosmos…
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.…
In order to account for the observable Universe, any comprehensive theory or model of cosmology must draw from many disciplines of physics, including gauge theories of strong and weak interactions, the hydrodynamics and microphysics of…
For two decades the hot big-bang model has been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not addressed by the standard cosmology and…
This paper presents a necessarily incomplete review of the evolution of cosmology since the first Astro/Cosmo Moriond meeting in 1981. I trace the journey from the classical Big Bang model based on three pillars -- universe expansion,…
For most of its history, cosmology was a qualitatively constrained discourse on the universe, shaped by limited observational access and the absence of global dynamical laws. This situation has changed decisively in recent decades. Modern…
The recent observational evidence for the acceleration of the universe demonstrates that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete - if not incorrect - and that new physics is out there, waiting to be discovered.…
The past fifty years have been an epoch of impressive progress in the field of astronomical technology. Practically all the technical tools, which we use today, have been developed during that time span. While the first half of this period…
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…