Related papers: Can the Universe Create Itself?
At its very beginning, the universe is believed to have grown exponentially in size via the mechanism of inflation. The almost scale-invariant density perturbation spectrum predicted by inflation is strongly supported by cosmological…
Inflationary cosmology attempts to provide a natural explanation for the flatness and homogeneity of the observable universe. In the context of reversible (unitary) evolution, this goal is difficult to satisfy, as Liouville's theorem…
Every society has a story rooted in its most ancient traditions, of how the earth and sky originated. Most of these stories attribute the origin of all things to a Creator - whether God, Element or Idea. We first recall that in the Western…
In the present model, a unified picture of cosmology from early inflation to late acceleration is obtained from $ f(R)-$ gravity with non-linear terms $ R^2 $ and $ R^5 $ of scalar curvature $R$. It is discussed that elementary particles…
On the one hand, inflation is an extremely convincing scenario: it solves most cosmological paradoxes and generates fluctuations that became the seeds for the growth of structures. It, however, suffers from a "naturalness" problem:…
Curiously, our Universe was born in a low entropy state, with abundant free energy to power stars and life. The form that this free energy takes is usually thought to be gravitational: the Universe is almost perfectly smooth, and so can…
We propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…
Quantum origin of the early inflationary Universe from the no-boundary and tunnelling quantum states is considered in the one-loop approximation of quantum cosmology. A universal effective action algorithm for the distribution function of…
It is possible that the expansion of the universe began with an inflationary phase, in which the inflaton driving the process also was a Higgs field capable of stabilizing magnetic monopoles in a grand-unified gauge theory. If so, then the…
We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit…
An accelerated universe should naturally have a vacuum energy density determined by its dynamical curvature. The cosmological constant is most likely a temporary description of a dynamical variable that has been drastically evolving from…
The Cyclic Model is a radical, new cosmological scenario which proposes that the Universe undergoes an endless sequence of epochs which begin with a `big bang' and end in a `big crunch.' When the Universe bounces from contraction to…
The ekpyrotic and cyclic universe scenarios have revived the idea that the density perturbations apparent in today's universe could have been generated in a `pre-singularity' epoch before the big bang. These scenarios provide explicit…
The gravitational collapse and the birth of a new universe are considered in terms of quantum mechanics. Transitions from annihilation of matter to deflation in the collapse and from inflation to creation of matter in the birth of a…
The existence of a thermodynamic arrow of time in the present universe implies that the initial state of the observable portion of our universe at (or near) the ``big bang'' must have been very ``special''. We argue that it is not plausible…
Current observational data is consistent with the universe being slightly closed. We investigate families of singular and non-singular closed instantons that could describe the beginning of a closed inflationary universe. We calculate the…
We consider a non singular origin for the Universe starting from an Einstein static Universe in the framework of a theory which uses two volume elements $\sqrt{-{g}}d^{4}x$ and $\Phi d^{4}x$, where $\Phi $ is a metric independent density,…
Open Inflation has recently been suggested as a possible way out of the age crisis caused by observations of a large rate of expansion of the universe, in conflict with the existence of very old globular clusters. It proposes that our local…
We summarize some applications of big bang nucleosythesis (BBN) and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to constrain the first moments of the creation of matter in the universe. We review the basic elements of BBN and how it constraints…
The aim of this thesis is to question some of the basic assumptions that go into building the $\Lambda$CDM model of our universe. The assumptions we focus on are the initial conditions of the universe, the fundamental forces in the universe…