Related papers: Anthropic Reasoning in Cosmology: A Historical Per…
Anthropic reasoning is a form of statistical reasoning based upon finding oneself a member of a particular reference class of conscious beings. By considering empirical distribution functions defined over animal life on Earth, we can deduce…
We review some aspects of quantum gravity in the context of cosmology. In particular, we focus on models with a phenomenology accessible to current and near-future observations, as the early Universe might be our only chance to peep through…
I present an overview of the science goals and achievements of ongoing spectroscopic surveys of individual stars in the nearby Universe. I include a brief discussion of the development of the field of Galactic Archaeology - using the fossil…
We survey a variety of cosmological problems where the issue of generality has arisen. This is aimed at providing a wider context for many claims and deductions made when philosophers of science choose cosmological problems for…
Astrobiology has been gaining increasing scientific prominence and public attention as the search for life beyond Earth continues to make significant headway on multiple fronts. In view of these recent developments, the fascinating and…
This paper is the second of two papers devoted to the study of the evolution of the cosmological horizons (particle and event horizons). Specifically, in this paper we consider the extremely general case of an accelerated universe with…
Since its beginnings in the 1940s, automated reasoning by computers has become a tool of ever growing importance in scientific research. So far, the rules underlying automated reasoning have mainly been formulated by humans, in the form of…
A general cosmological principle -- Aleph -- is proposed as a substitute to the Anthropic principle. Furthermore, the universe, conceived as a world ensemble, is characterized by many (possibly infinite) X-Life world principles. The only…
The old cosmological constant problem is to understand why the vacuum energy is so small; the new problem is to understand why it is comparable to the present mass density. Several approaches to these problems are reviewed. Quintessence…
Whether we live in a spatially finite universe, and what its shape and size may be, are among the fundamental long-standing questions in cosmology. These questions of topological nature have become particularly topical, given the wealth of…
In recent years, by theory and observation cosmology has advanced substantially. Parameters of the concordance or $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model are given with unprecedented precision ("precision cosmology"). On the other side, 95% of the…
This study in the philosophy of cosmology is a part of an ongoing effort to investigate and reassess the importance of the anthropic (Davies-Tipler) argument against cosmologies containing the past temporal infinity. Obviously, the prime…
Reasoning, a fundamental cognitive process integral to human intelligence, has garnered substantial interest within artificial intelligence. Notably, recent studies have revealed that chain-of-thought prompting significantly enhances LLM's…
The present article analyses the impact on cosmology, in particular on the evolution of cosmological perturbations, of the existence of extra-dimensions. The model considered here is that of a five-dimensional Anti-de Sitter spacetime where…
This is the written version of an invited review talk for the 13 Feb 2004 AAAS Meeting in Seattle. The talk's goal is to present a philosophical view of extragalactic astronomy as it applies to the sub-field of galaxy evolution. The talk is…
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like…
I explain the difficulty of making various concepts of and relating to probability precise, rigorous and physically significant when attempting to apply them in reasoning about objects (e.g., spacetimes) living in infinite-dimensional…
I discuss the historical roots of the landscape problem and propose criteria for its successful resolution. This provides a perspective to evaluate the possibility to solve it in several of the speculative cosmological scenarios under study…
This meeting is entitled "A Century of Cosmology." But most of the papers being given here are based on work done very recently and there is really no attempt being made to critically review what has taken place in the last 90 or 100 years.…
The Anthropocene is a proposed time subdivision of the earth's history correlated to the strong human perturbation of the ecosystem. Much debate is ongoing about what date should be considered as the start of the Anthropocene, but much less…