Related papers: Current Trends in Mathematical Cosmology
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.…
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…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
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…
In this expository article we describe the attempt of defining cosmological singularities and we discuss their meaning in classical and quantum cosmology.
I give a compact, pedagogical review of our present understanding of the universe as based on general relativity. This includes the uniform models, with special reference to the cosmological 'constant'; and the equations for…
Cosmography represents an important branch of cosmology which aims to describe the universe without the need of postulating \emph{a priori} any particular cosmological model. All quantities of interest are expanded as a Taylor series around…
At present, there is practically no doubt that general relativity is closely related to gravity. Moreover, after the work of Jacobson, Padmanabhan and others, it became clear that a thermodynamic interpretation of Einstein's relativistic…
These four lectures cover four topics in modern cosmology: the cosmological constant, the cosmic microwave background, inflation, and cosmology as a probe of physics at the Planck scale. The underlying theme is that cosmology gives us a…
Whether we live in a spatially finite universe, and what its shape and size may be, are among the fundamental long-standing questions in cosmology. These questions of topological nature have become particularly topical, given the wealth of…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
Universe structure emerges in the unreduced, complex-dynamical interaction process with the simplest initial configuration (two attracting homogeneous fields). The unreduced interaction analysis avoiding any perturbative model gives…
Cosmology is undergoing an explosive period of activity, fueled both by new, accurate astrophysical data and by innovative theoretical developments. Cosmological parameters such as the total density of the Universe and the rate of…
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…
Problems with uniform probabilities on an infinite support show up in contemporary cosmology. This paper focuses on the context of inflation theory, where it complicates the assignment of a probability measure over pocket universes. The…
We review a cosmology in which particles are fluctuationally created from a background Zero Point Field. This cosmology is consistent with recent observations of an ever expanding and accelerating universe, as also the recently confirmed…
We give an introduction to the cosmological multiverse, aimed at an audience of artists. We discuss general relativity -- our modern theory of gravity -- and the cosmological constant, which is widely believed to be responsible for the…
We introduce the notion of the cosmic numbers of a cosmological model, and discuss how they can be used to naturally classify models according to their ability to solve some of the problems of the standard cosmological model.
We consider different aspects of the problem of cosmological singularity such as the BKL oscillatory approach to singularity, the new features of the cosmological dynamics in the neighbourhood of the singularity in multidimensional and…
We study the possible singularities of isotropic cosmological models that have a varying speed of light as well as a varying gravitational constant. The field equations typically reduce to two dimensional systems which are then analyzed…