Related papers: Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Pri…
Everlasting inflation has far-reaching implications for cosmology and the standing of self-localizing inferences made by observers, which have been subjects of renewed interest in light of the growing acceptance of theory landscapes and the…
In recent analyses of standard, single-universe, cosmology, it was pointed out that specific assumptions regarding the distribution and motion of matter must be made in order to set up the cosmological standard model with a global time…
Inflation is a bold and expansive extension of the Standard Cosmology. It holds the promise to extend our understanding of the Universe to within 10^{-32}sec of the big bang and answer most of the pressing questions in cosmology. Its…
This paper is intended to offer a pedagogical treatment of cosmological modeling and inflationary cosmology. In recent years, inflation has become accepted as a standard scenario making predictions that are testable by observations of the…
We give a consistent description of how the inflationary Universe emerges in quantum cosmology. This involves two steps: Firstly, it is shown that a sensible probability peak can be obtained from the cosmological wave function. This is…
Causality is a seminal concept in science: Any research discipline, from sociology and medicine to physics and chemistry, aims at understanding the causes that could explain the correlations observed among some measured variables. While…
An introductory account is given of the inflationary cosmology, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the Universe's earliest stages. The historical motivation is briefly outlined, and the modelling of the inflationary…
We consider a novel model of cosmic inflation. In our model one does not need any specific matter field to drive inflation, but inflation stems from the microscopic, Planck scale structure of spacetime, thus being of quantum gravitational…
We attempt to dissolve the measurement problem using an anthropic principle which allows us to invoke rational observers. We argue that the key feature of such observers is that they are rational (we need not care whether they are…
We discuss the Carter's formula about the mankind evolution probability following the derivation proposed by Barrow and Tipler. We stress the relation between the existence of billions of galaxies and the evolution of at least one…
Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the…
The (re)introduction of $\Lambda$ into cosmology has spurred debates that touch on central questions in philosophy of science, as well as the foundations of general relativity and particle physics. We provide a systematic assessment of the…
After a brief summary of general relativity and cosmology, we present the basic concepts underlying inflation, the currently best motivated models for the early Universe. We describe the simplest inflation models, based on a single scalar…
I review the role and meaning of the Anthropic Principle, particularly in its relevance to particle physics.
The inflationary scenario has become the paradigm of early universe cosmology, and - in conjuction with ideas from superstring theory - has led to speculations about an "inflationary multiverse". From a point of view of phenomenology, the…
It is already understood that the increasing observational evidence for an open Universe may be reconciled with inflation if our horizon is contained inside one single huge bubble nucleated during the inflationary phase transition. In the…
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
This paper offers a synthesis of the positions in the literature regarding controversies about the multiverse. After reviewing some simple elements of modern cosmology and its observational limitations, we will present the history of the…
Currently, a method has been developed for the cosmological inflation model with a single scalar field to calculate cosmological parameters such as the power spectrum of scalar and tensor perturbations, their spectral indices, and the…
The primordial Universe can be used as a laboratory to set constraints on quantum gravity. In the framework of Loop Quantum Cosmology, we show that such a proposal for quantum gravity not only solves for the big bang singularity issue but…