Related papers: Cosmology with Varying Constants
For several independent reasons, the idea that notorious sources of entropy could exist in the Universe has been recently revived. Taking advantage of a new framework accounting for non-equilibrium processes in cosmology, we explicitly…
The spin-statistics connection, quantum gravity and other physical considerations suggest that classical space-time topology is not an immutable attribute and can change in quantum physics. The implementation of topology change using…
Cosmology today is confronted with several seemingly insoluble puzzles and strange, inexplicable coincidences. But a careful re-examination of the Cosmological principle and the Weyl postulate, foundational elements in this subject,…
The cosmological constant problem arises at the intersection between general relativity and quantum field theory, and is regarded as a fundamental problem in modern physics. In this paper we describe the historical and conceptual origin of…
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…
We propose that cosmological time is {\it effectively} the conjugate of the constants of nature. Different definitions of time arise, with the most relevant related to the constant controlling the dynamics in each epoch. The Hamiltonian…
It is a remarkable fact that all processes occurring in the observable Universe are irreversible, whereas the equations through which the fundamental laws of physics are formulated are invariant under time reversal. The emergence of…
Astrophysical observations suggest that the fine structure constant (alpha) may (or may not) be evolving over the cosmological time scale. This raises a much debated question: is alpha variation due to the variation of the speed of light…
The effective coupling `constants' of physics, especially the cosmological constant, are observed to have highly biophilic values. If this is not a hugely improbable accident, or a consequence of some mysterious logical necessity or of some…
Light scalar fields very naturally appear in modern cosmological models, affecting such parameters of Standard Model as electromagnetic fine structure constant $\alpha$, dimensionless ratios of electron or quark mass to the QCD scale,…
The effect of a time dependent cosmological constant is considered in a family of scalar tensor theories. Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmological models for vacumm and perfect fluid matter are found. They have a linear expansion factor, the…
We present here a note which synthesizes our previous ideas concerning some problems in cosmology, and the numerical correspondences between the physical constants that we could deduce.
It has been known that dimensional constants such as $\hbar$, $c$, $G$, $e$, and $k$ are merely human constructs whose values and units vary depending on the chosen system of measurement. Therefore, the time variation of dimensional…
Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…
This paper continues the development of a discrete space-time concept that is recently used in the explanation of the cosmological constant. Instead of order estimation, a more theoretical treatment of the theory is introduced. Based on the…
The possibility of extending the quantum mechanical superposition principle to free parameters such as the cosmological constant appearing in the Lagrangian of physical theories is examined. If the cosmological constant is subject to a…
A cosmological constant, Lambda, is the most natural candidate to explain the origin of the dark energy (DE) component in the Universe. However, due to experimental evidence that the equation of state (EOS) of the DE could be evolving with…
In this paper the results obtained by Minic and his colleagues on the uncertainty relation of the pair "cosmological constant - volume of space-time", where cosmological constant is a dynamical quantity, are reconsidered and generalized…
We argue that models in which an observable variation of the fine structure constant is explained by motion of a cosmic scalar field, are not stable under renormalization, and require massive fine tuning that cannot be explained by any…
We propose an approach to explaining why naive large quantum fluctuations are not the right estimate for the cosmological constant. We argue that the universe is in a superposition of many vacua, in such a way that the resulting…