Related papers: Anthropic Reasoning in Cosmology: A Historical Per…
A review of the principles of observational testing of cosmological theories is given with a special emphasis on the distinction between observational facts and theoretical hypotheses. A classification of modern cosmological theories and…
Various contributions to the cosmological constant are discussed and confronted with its recent measurement. We briefly review different scenarious -- and their difficulties -- for a solution of the cosmological constant problem.
The recent discovery that Einstein once attempted - and quickly abandoned - a steady-state model of the expanding universe sheds new light on his philosophical journey from static to dynamic cosmologies.
In this book are studied, from the perspective of the dynamical systems, several Universe models. In chapter 1 we give a bird's eye view on cosmology and cosmological problems. Chapter 2 is devoted to a brief review on some results and…
From the first observations made by Slipher, our understanding and interpretation of the cosmological redshift was evolving until reaching the current consensus, through the expanding universe and the emergence of modern physical cosmology…
For several independent reasons, the idea that notorious sources of entropy could exist in the Universe has been recently revived. Taking advantage of a new framework accounting for non-equilibrium processes in cosmology, we explicitly…
From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a "path of progress" in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many "indigenous cosmologies" that still exist…
We present a brief review of Cosmological Inflation from the personal perspective of the author who almost 30 years ago proposed a way of resolving the problem of Cosmological Horizon by employing certain notions and developments from the…
The existence of multiple regions of space beyond the observable Universe (within the so-called "multiverse") where the vacuum energy density takes different values, has been postulated as an explanation for the low non-zero value observed…
In this paper, we make a review on the concepts of rationality across several different fields, namely in economics, psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology. We review how processes like natural selection can help us…
The network of cosmological tests is tight enough now to show that the relativistic Big Bang cosmology is a good approximation to what happened as the universe expanded and cooled through light element production and evolved to the present.…
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
Human influence on the biosphere has been evident at least since the development of widespread agriculture, and some stratigraphers have suggested that the activities of modern civilization indicate a geological epoch transition. The study…
A general sketch on how the problem of space dimensionality depends on anthropic arguments is presented. Several examples of how life has been used to constraint space dimensionality (and vice-versa) are reviewed. In particular, the…
A new idea of deriving a cosmological term from an underlying theory has been proposed in order to explain the expansion history of the universe. We obtain the scale factor with this derived cosmological term and demonstrate that it…
The idea of possible time or space variations of the `fundamental' constants of nature, although not new, is only now beginning to be actively considered by large numbers of researchers in the particle physics, cosmology and astrophysics…
Cosmology differs in some respects significantly from other sciences, primarily because of its intimate association with issues of a conceptual and philosophical nature. Because cosmology in the broader sense relates to the world views held…
How special (or not) is the epoch we are living in? What is the appropriate reference class for embedding the observations made at the present time? How probable -- or else -- is anything we observe in the fulness of time? Contemporary…
Observational astronomy has shown significant growth over the last decade and has made important contributions to cosmology. A major paradigm shift in cosmology was brought about by observations of Type Ia supernovae. The notion that the…
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…