Related papers: Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Pri…

The "new standard cosmology", based on the theory of inflation, has very impressive observational support. I review some outstanding problems of the new cosmology and the global view of the universe -- the multiverse -- that it suggests. I…

Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…

In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…

Despite its central role in modern cosmology, doubts are often expressed as to whether cosmological inflation is really a falsifiable theory. We distinguish two facets of inflation, one as a theory of initial conditions for the hot big bang…

The notion of inflation (past or present) in standard cosmological models is shown to be a consequence of a sufficiently high second law entropy production from the internal heating of the universal expansion. The longitudinal viscous…

Inflation in the early Universe is one of the most promising probes of gravity in the high-energy regime. However, observable scales give access to a limited window in the inflationary dynamics. In this essay, we argue that quantum…

Cosmic inflation provides a window to the highest energy densities accessible in nature, far beyond those achievable in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Theoretical insights into the inflationary era and its observational probes may…

The early Universe inflation is well known as a promising theory to explain the origin of large scale structure of the Universe, a causal theory for the origin of primordial density fluctuations which may explain the observed density…

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…

Valid ideas that physical reality is vastly larger than human perception of it, and that the perceived part may not be representative of the whole, exist on many levels and have a long history. After a brief general inventory of those ideas…

The problem of interpreting quantum theory on a large (e.g. cosmological) scale has been commonly conceived as a search for objective reality in a framework that is fundamentally probabilistic. The Everett programme attempts to evade the…

This article discusses density perturbations in inflationary models, offering a pedagogical description of how these perturbations are generated by quantum fluctuations in the early universe. A key feature of inflation is that that rapid…

Inflation predicts that quantum fluctuations determine the large scale structure of the Universe. This raises the striking possibility that quantum mechanics, developed to describe nature at short distances, can be tested by studying nature…

The purpose of the paper, of which this is part II, is to review, clarify, and critically analyse modern mathematical cosmology. The emphasis is upon mathematical objects and structures, rather than numerical computations. Part II provides…

We analyze cosmology assuming unitary quantum mechanics, using a tripartite partition into system, observer and environment degrees of freedom. This generalizes the second law of thermodynamics to "The system's entropy can't decrease unless…

The difficult issues related to the interpretation of quantum mechanics and, in particular, the "measurement problem" are revisited using as motivation the process of generation of structure from quantum fluctuations in inflationary…

An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…

This paper deals with the philosophical issues of the notion of nothingness and pre-inflationary stage of the universe in physical cosmology. We presuppose that, in addition to cosmological limits, there may be both anthropic and…

Anthropic models can give testable predictions, which can be confirmed or falsified at a specified confidence level. This is illustrated using the successful prediction of the cosmological constant as an example. The history and the nature…

We discuss the anthropic principle and its implications for our existence and the physical laws which govern the universe. Several amazing coincidences which provide conditions necessary for creation of life suggest that the "laws of…