Related papers: The Inverted Big-Bang
For many years, the most active area of quantum cosmology has been the issue of choosing boundary conditions for the wave function of a universe. Recently, loop quantum cosmology, which is obtained from loop quantum gravity, has shed new…
Is it possible to induce an effective generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) emerging from geometry and reinterpret the gravitational GUP as the effective uncertainty relation induced by microscopic horizon geometry? More broadly, is it…
In the late 1990s, observations of type Ia supernovae led to the astounding discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The explanation of this anomalous acceleration has been one of the great problems in physics since…
The emergence of a highly improbable coincidence in cosmological observations speaks to a remarkably simple cosmic expansion. Compelling evidence now suggests that the Universe's gravitational horizon, coincident with the better known…
We argue that space and space-time emerge as a consequence of dynamical collapse of the wave function of macroscopic objects. Locality and separability are properties of our approximate, emergent universe. At the fundamental level,…
We show that the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity with torsion not only extends general relativity to account for the intrinsic spin of matter, but it may also eliminate major problems in gravitational physics and answer…
Despite being created through a fundamentally quantum-mechanical process, cosmological structures have not yet revealed any sign of genuine quantum correlations. Among the obstructions to the direct detection of quantum signatures in…
A model is proposed to demonstrate that classical general relativity can emerge from loop quantum gravity, in a relational description of gravitational field in terms of the coordinates given by matter. Local Dirac observables and coherent…
We discuss how a cyclic model for the flat universe can be constructively derived from Loop Quantum Gravity. This model has a lower bounce, at small values of the scale factor, which shares many similarities with that of Loop Quantum…
General relativity is a background-independent theory of a dynamical classical spacetime geometry. Quantum theory is formulated in a classical spacetime, as an intrinsically probabilistic, contextual theory of non-classical, interfering…
We compare the recent loop quantum cosmology approach of Bojowald and co-workers with earlier quantum cosmological schemes. Because the weak-energy condition can now be violated at short distances, and not necessarily with a high energy…
It is shown that quantum vacuum fluctuations give rise to a curvature of space-time of the order appropriate to explain the observed accelerated expansion of the universe. The fact that the fluctuations produce curvature, even if the…
We perform large-scale cosmological simulations that solve Einstein's equations directly via numerical relativity. Starting with initial conditions sampled from the cosmic microwave background, we track the emergence of a cosmic web without…
Quantum gravity is known to be mostly a kind of metaphysical speculation. In this brief essay, we try to argue that, although still extremely difficult to reach, observational signatures can in fact be expected. The early universe is an…
We investigate the gravitational property of the quantum vacuum by treating its large energy density predicted by quantum field theory seriously and assuming that it does gravitate to obey the equivalence principle of general relativity. We…
Old and new puzzles of cosmology are reexamined from the point of view of quantum theory of the universe developed here. It is shown that in proposed approach the difficulties of the standard cosmology do not arise. The theory predicts the…
We point out that scenarios in which the universe is born from the interior of a black hole may not posses many of the problems of the Standard Big-Bang (SBB) model. In particular we demonstrate that the horizon problem, flatness, and the…
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…
In this topical review we discuss the connections between chaos, decoherence and quantum cosmology. We understand chaos as classical chaos in systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom, decoherence as environment induced decoherence…
We illustrate the crucial role played by decoherence (consistency of quantum histories) in extracting consistent quantum probabilities for alternative histories in quantum cosmology. Specifically, within a Wheeler-DeWitt quantization of a…