Related papers: The Hot Big Bang and Beyond
Inflation is a bold and expansive extension of the Standard Cosmology. It holds the promise to extend our understanding of the Universe to within 10^{-32}sec of the big bang and answer most of the pressing questions in cosmology. Its…
This essay is a nontechnical primer for a broader audience, in which I paint a broad-brush picture of modern cosmology. I begin by reviewing the evidence for the big bang, including the expansion of our Universe, the cosmic microwave…
Accounting for large-scale structure in our universe will require not only reasonably accurate mathematical models of its cosmogony, topology and cosmology, but also a more deeper understanding of our fundamental physical concepts of space,…
The good agreement between large-scale observations and the predictions of the now-standard $\Lambda$CDM theory gives us hope that this will become a lasting foundation for cosmology. After briefly reviewing the current status of the key…
The standard cosmological model, now strongly constrained by direct observation at early epochs, is very successful in describing the structure of the evolved universe on large and intermediate scales. Unfortunately, serious contradictions…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
The Standard Cosmological Model has experienced tremendous success at reproducing observational data by assuming a universe dominated by a cosmological constant and dark matter in a flat geometry. However, several studies, based on local…
In this letter, we outline an inhomogeneous model of the Big Bang cosmology. For the inhomogeneous spacetime used here, the universe originates in the infinite past as the one dominated by vacuum energy and ends in the infinite future as…
A simple yet compelling physical picture is proposed for the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and the Big Bang. The proposal leads to predictions, from first-principles with high precision, for the values of the Hubble constant,…
We confront the big bang for the beginning of the universe with an equivalent picture of a slow freeze - a very cold and slowly evolving universe. In the freeze picture the masses of elementary particles increase and the gravitational…
A better understanding of the formation of large-scale structure in the Universe is arguably the most pressing question in cosmology. The most compelling and promising theoretical paradigm, Inflation + Cold Dark Matter, holds that the…
The discovery and confirmation that some nuclides were formed soon after the Big Bang is one of the strongest arguments in favour of the Hot Big Bang theory. The process of combining protons and neutrons in a hot, expanding universe is…
Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…
The discussion of cosmological parameters used to be a source of embarrassment to cosmologists. Today, measurements of the cosmological parameters are leading the way into the era of precision cosmology. The CMB temperature is measured to…
A general-relativistic theory of cosmology, the dynamical variables of which are those of Hubble's, namely distances and redshifts, is presented. The theory describes the universe as having a three-phase evolution with a decelerating…
Age consistency for the Universe today has been an important cosmological test. Even more powerful consistency tests at times as early as 10^{-32} sec lie ahead in the precision era of cosmology. I outline tests based upon cosmic microwave…
A model for gravitational collapse where the event horizon is a quantum critical phase transition is extended to provide an explanation for the origin of the observable universe, where the expanding universe that we observe today was…
Combining intervals of ekpyrotic (ultra-slow) contraction with a (non-singular) classical bounce naturally leads to a novel cyclic theory of the universe in which the Hubble parameter, energy density and temperature oscillate periodically,…
The established cosmological theory which describes the history of the Universe since shortly after the "Big Bang" until today is remarkably successful. Thanks to the increasing precision of available observational data, we are now able to…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…