Related papers: Anthropic Reasoning in Cosmology: A Historical Per…
Scientific cosmology has now reached its period of maturity with the establishment of a standard model, which is the theory of an expanding universe. The question of whether this expansion resolves itself, in the past, into a singularity…
Analogical reasoning is an essential aspect of human cognition. In this paper, we summarize key theory about the processes underlying analogical reasoning from the cognitive science literature and relate it to current research in natural…
One of the main challenges in cosmology is to quantify how small density fluctuations at the recombination epoch z around 1000 evolved into the galaxies and the large-scale structure we observe in the universe today. This thesis discusses…
How did the human species evolve the capacity not just to communicate complex ideas to one another but to hold such conversations from across the globe, using remote devices constructed from substances that do not exist in the natural…
Using an approach that treats the Ricci scalar itself as a degree of freedom, we analyze the cosmological evolution within an f(R) model that has been proposed recently (exponential gravity) and that can be viable for explaining the…
Over the past decades, advancements in observational cosmology have introduced us in an era of precision cosmology, dramatically enhancing our understanding of the Universe's history as well as bringing new tensions to light. Observations…
We consider the little-known anthropic argument of Fontenelle dealing with the nature of cometary orbits, given a year before the publication of Newton's Principia. This is particularly interesting in view of the rapid development of the…
Cultural astronomy reveals ways in which perception and culture have shaped the interpretation of the night sky.
We discuss some of the cosmological constraints on the evolution and persistence of life in the Universe and in hypothetical universes other than our own. We highlight the role played by the age and size of the universe, and discuss the…
Cosmology from the Top Down.
In an undulant universe, cosmic expansion is characterized by alternating periods of acceleration and deceleration. We examine cosmologies in which the dark-energy equation of state varies periodically with the number of e-foldings of the…
We consider the cosmological horizons in the expanding universe from the point of view of observer moving with respect to CMB frame. The deformation (non-sphericity) of cosmological horizons is demonstrated. Some principle consequences are…
This article gives a brief overview of the status of attempts to constrain inflation using observations, and examines prospects for future developments.
Recent years have seen dramatic progress in cosmology and particle astrophysics. So much so that anyone who dares to offer an overview would certainly risk him- or herself for being incomplete and biased at best, and even incorrect due to…
An introductory account is given of the modern understanding of the physics of the early Universe. Particular emphasis is placed on the paradigm of cosmological inflation, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the…
Understanding the space of possible theoretical explanations for the observed cosmic acceleration is a central challenge of modern cosmology. This brief document sketches selected aspects of approaches to this problem, focusing on the…
The objective of this paper is not simply to present an historical overview of Einstein's cosmological considerations, but to discuss the central role they played in shaping the paradigm of relativistic cosmology. This, we'll show, was a…
We have had the chance to live through a fascinating revolution in measuring the fundamental empirical cosmological Hubble law. The key progress is analysed : 1) improvement of observational means (ground-based radio and optical…
A historical perspective on the study of asymmetries in planetary nebulae (PNs) is presented. We also describe our ongoing work in high resolution spectroscopy of planetaries, and discuss some likely future directions for the study of…
Understanding the evolution of entropy in the universe is a fundamental aspect of cosmology. This paper investigates the evolution of entropy in a spatially flat $K=0$ universe, focusing on the contributions of matter, radiation, and dark…