Related papers: Spacetime and vacuum as seen from Moscow
This is a chapter of the planned monograph "Out of Nowhere: The Emergence of Spacetime in Quantum Theories of Gravity", co-authored by Nick Huggett and Christian W\"uthrich and under contract with Oxford University Press. (More information…
This article is the written version of the closing talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Italy, in August 2007. I focus on the prospects of constraining fundamental physics from cosmological…
Physicists in search of the foundation of the world: how tiny objects can create matter, energy and even space and time - and possibly countless other universes. -- This article is meant as an introduction into quantum geometry (loop…
Quantum effects in the era of reheating of the universe after inflation are considered. A semiclassical approach to gravity theory is applied within Starobinsky's inflationary model with backreaction. Some subtleties associated with…
We consider various curious features of general relativity, and relativistic field theory, in two spacetime dimensions. In particular, we discuss: the vanishing of the Einstein tensor; the failure of an initial-value formulation for vacuum…
Faced with the persisting problem of the unification of gravity with other fundamental interactions we investigate the possibility of a new paradigm, according to which the basic space of physics is a multidimensional space ${\cal C}$…
I discuss several issues related to "classical" spacetime structure. I review Galilean, Newtonian, and Leibnizian spacetimes, and briefly describe more recent developments. The target audience is undergraduates and early graduate students…
One of the deepest insights from the general theory of relativity is the relational nature of spacetime. While it is a generally agreed on that the nature of spacetime must be drastically different at the Planck scale, it has been a common…
These are expanded notes for a short series of lectures, presented at the University of Luxembourg in 2017, giving an introduction to some of the ideas of supersymmetry and supergeometry. In particular, we start from some motivating facts…
This is an extended version of a talk on October 4, 2004 at the research seminar ``Differential geometry and applications'' (headed by Academician A. T. Fomenko) at Moscow State University. The paper contains an overview of available (but…
This Symposium is devoted to the Memory of Lev Kofman, June-17-1957-November-12-2009. The accelerated expansion of the Universe, which is today observed, shows that cosmological dynamics is dominated by the so-called Dark Energy field which…
The standard cosmological model, based on Cold Dark Matter and Dark Energy ({\Lambda}CDM), faces several challenges. Among these is the need to adjust the scenario to account for he presence of vast voids in the large-scale structure of the…
This article presents a comprehensive and rigorous overview of spacetime singularities within the framework of classical General Relativity. Singularities are defined through the failure of geodesic completeness, reflecting the limits of…
The state-of-the-art physics consists of two irreconcilable branches, i.e., the quantum theory and the general relativity, which work well in their own territories, independently. However, what are quantum and spacetime after all? The key…
On the occasion of the Centennial of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Carnegie Observatories held a series of four astrophysics symposia in Pasadena from October 2002 to February 2003. The topics of the symposia were: (1) Coevolution…
For over a century Minkowskian spacetime has dominated discussions of space contraction and time dilation within special relativity. Brown and Pooley have called into question both the assumptions of Minkowski and the effects his presumed…
This paper is an extended version of a series of lectures on polar spaces given during the workshop and conference 'Groups and Geometries', held at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore in December 2012. The aim of this paper is to…
What is the distance between two points in spacetime? This is a basic geometric question, which so far has no single, definitive answer. Unlike their Riemannian cousins, Lorentzian manifolds are not known to carry a canonical distance…
This is a rough transcript of talks given at the Workshop on Groups & Algebras in M Theory at Rutgers University, May 31--Jun 04, 2005. We review the basic motivation for a pre-geometric formulation of nonperturbative String/M theory, and…
In this contribution to the conference "Beyond Einstein: Historical Perspectives on Geometry, Gravitation and Cosmology in the Twentieth Century", we give a critical status report of attempts to explain the late accelerated expansion of the…