Related papers: A cosmic hall of mirrors
Many believe that the deep question of "why is there something rather than nothing?" is unanswerable. The universe just is and no further explanation for its existence is possible. In this paper I explain why this question must have an…
The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We discuss…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Vacuum Einstein theory in three spacetime dimensions is locally trivial, but admits many solutions that are globally different, particularly if there is a negative cosmological constant. The classical theory of such locally "anti-de Sitter"…
In this paper, the theoretical terms of contemporary cosmology are examined as intellectual artefacts. An ontology and methodology are introduced for this purpose, which includes defining the concept of a hypothetical object. Introducing a…
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…
The great emptiness is a possible beginning of the Universe in the infinite past of physical time. For the epoch of great emptiness particles are extremely rare and effectively massless. Only expectation values of fields and average…
Quantization of gravity suggests that a finite region of space has a finite number of degrees of freedom or `bits'. What happens to these bits when spacetime expands, as in cosmological evolution? Using gravity/field theory duality we argue…
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…
Recently, the notion that the number of vacua is enormous has received increased attentions, which may be regarded as a possible anthropical explanation to incredible small cosmological constant. Further, a dynamical mechanisms to implement…
We consider the Multiverse as an ensemble of universes. Using standard statistical physics analysis we get that the Cosmological Constant (CC) is exponentially small. The small and finite CC is achieved without any anthropic reasoning. We…
The topology of space is usually assumed simply connected, but could be multi-connected. We review in the latter case the possibility that topological defects arising at high energy phase transitions might still be present and find that…
It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute…
In the model where the Universe is considered as a thin shell expanding in 5-dimensional hyper-space there is a possibility to have just one scale for a particle theory corresponding to the Universe thickness. From a realistic model the…
I survey physics theories involving parallel universes, arguing that they form a natural four-level hierarchy of multiverses allowing progressively greater diversity. Level I: A generic prediction of inflation is an infinite ergodic…
The solution of Einstein's field equations in Cosmological General Relativity (CGR), where the Galaxy is at the center of a finite yet bounded spherically symmetrical isotropic gravitational field, is identical with the unbounded solution.…
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the various types of physical universe which could exist according to modern mathematical physics. The paper begins with an introduction that approaches the question from the viewpoint of ontic…
A new way of probing the large-scale structure of the universe is proposed. Space is partitioned into cells the shape of rhombic dodecahedron. The cells are labelled ``filled'' or ``empty'' according as they contain galaxies or not. The…
We give a comparative description of different types of regular static, spherically symmetric black holes (BHs) and discuss in more detail their particular type, which we suggest to call black universes. The latter have a Schwarzschild-like…
We explore the possibility that the entire departure of galactic rotational velocities from their luminous Newtonian expectation be cosmological in origin, and show that within the framework of conformal gravity (but not Einstein gravity…