Related papers: Extending cosmological natural selection
Recent observations of high-redshift supernovae seem to suggest that the global geometry of the Universe may be affected by a `cosmological constant', which acts to accelerate the expansion rate with time. But these data by themselves still…
It is pointed out that very recent results based on supernovae observations that the universe will accelerate and expand for ever with ever decreasing density have been predicted in a recent cosmological model which also deduces hitherto…
A new interpretation of quantum mechanics is proposed according to which precedence, freedom and novelty play central roles. This is based on a modification of the postulates for quantum theory given by Masanes and Muller. We argue that…
The idea that the vacuum energy density $\rho_{\Lambda}$ could be time dependent is a most reasonable one in the expanding Universe; in fact, much more reasonable than just a rigid cosmological constant for the entire cosmic history. Being…
The universe we observe is homogeneous on super-horizon scales, leading to the ``cosmic homogeneity problem''. Inflation alleviates this problem but cannot solve it within the realm of conservative extrapolations of classical physics. A…
Based on a more careful canonical analysis, we motivate a reduced quantization - in the sense of superspace quantization - of slightly inhomogeneous cosmology in place of the Dirac quantization in the existing literature, and provide it in…
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…
The appeal of thermodynamics to problems outside physics is undeniable, as is the growing recognition of its apparent universality, yet in the absence of a rigorous formalism divorced from the peculiarities of molecular systems all attempts…
Under the assumption that General Relativity (GR) correctly describes the phenomenology of our Universe, astronomical observations provide compelling evidence that (1) the dynamics of cosmic structure is dominated by dark matter (DM), an…
We investigate the connection between the entanglement generated by expanding universe and the cosmological parameters. We show that the faster the universe expands and the larger the total volume results the higher degree of entanglement.
Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of quantum-scale experiments, the physical interpretations of these theories remain controversial. In this manuscript, we propose a new…
Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design,…
I review the basis and limitations of plausible inference in cosmology, in particular the limitation that it can only provide fundamentally true inferences when the hypotheses under consideration form a set that is exhaustive. They never…
The experimental evidence that the equation of state (EOS) of the dark energy (DE) could be evolving with time/redshift (including the possibility that it might behave phantom-like near our time) suggests that there might be dynamical DE…
It has been argued in the literature that if a universe is expanding with an accelerating rate indefinitely, it presents a challenge to string theories due to the existence of event horizons. We study the fate of a currently accelerating…
The actual existence of collections of universes -- multiverses -- is strongly suggested by leading approaches to quantum cosmology, and has been proposed earlier as an attractive way to explain the apparent fine-tuned character of our…
Based on the cosmological principle only, the method of describing the evolution of the Universe, called cosmography, is in fact a kinematics of cosmological expansion. The effectiveness of cosmography lies in the fact that it allows, based…
We point out that, due to the nonlinearity of the Einstein equations, a homogeneous approximation in cosmology leads to the appearance of an additional term in the Friedmann equation. This new term is associated with the spatial…
Recent advances in string theory and inflationary cosmology have led to a surge of interest in the possible existence of an ensemble of cosmic regions, or universes, among the members of which key physical parameters, such as the masses of…
Within the context of a recently proposed family of stochastic dynamical laws for causal sets, one can ask whether the universe might have emerged from the quantum-gravity era with a large enough size and with sufficient homogeneity to…