Related papers: The Universe is a Strange Place
Answering well-known fundamental questions is usually regarded as the major goal of science. Discovery of other unknown and fundamental questions is, however, even more important. Recognition that "we didn't know anything" is the basic…
The universe is composed of ordinary matter (for example, stars, planets, ourselves), dark matter and dark energy. The estimated percentage of dark matter is about $27\%$ of the entire universe, while $5\%$ is ordinary matter and the…
Dark matter, proposed decades ago as a speculative component of the universe, is now known to be the vital ingredient in the cosmos, eight times more abundant than ordinary matter, one quarter of the total energy density and the component…
Dark matter is a fundamental constituent of the universe, which is needed to explain a wide variety of astrophysical and cosmological observations. Although the existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly a century ago and its…
It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…
Dark matter is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in cosmology at the present time. About 80% of the universe's gravitating matter is non-luminous, and its nature and distribution are for the most part unknown. In this paper, we will…
One of the great mysteries of contemporary science is dark matter, an exotic substance of unknown nature that, in theory, makes up about 27\% of the total mass-energy density of the universe, and which does not appear to emit, absorb, or…
For the past 15 years most astronomers have assumed that 95% of the Universe was in some mysterious form of cold dark matter. They also assumed that the cosmological constant, Omega_Lambda, was Einstein's biggest blunder and could be…
We are emerging from a period of consolidation in particle physics. Its great, historic achievement was to establish the Theory of Matter. This Theory will serve as our description of ordinary matter under ordinary conditions -- allowing…
This is a broad and in places unconventional overview of the strengths and shortcomings of our standard models of fundamental physics and of cosmology. The emphasis is on ideas that have accessible experimental consequences. It becomes…
Cosmology today is confronted with several seemingly insoluble puzzles and strange, inexplicable coincidences. But a careful re-examination of the Cosmological principle and the Weyl postulate, foundational elements in this subject,…
One of the great scientific enigmas still unsolved, the existence of dark matter, is reviewed. Simple gravitational arguments imply that most of the mass in the Universe, at least 90%, is some (unknown) non-luminous matter. Some particle…
Over the past three years we have determined the basic features of the Universe -- spatially flat; accelerating; comprised of 1/3 a new form of matter, 2/3 a new form of energy, with some ordinary matter and a dash of massive neutrinos; and…
To many people, music is a mystery. It is uniquely human, because no other species produces elaborate, well organized sound for no particular reason. It has been part of every known civilization on earth. It has become a very part of man's…
The Standard Model of cosmology states a surprising composition of the Universe, in which ordinary matter accounts for less than 5%. The remaining 95% are composed of ~70% Dark Energy and ~25% Dark Matter. However, those two components have…
2017 observations by Riess and coworkers have indicated that the universe is expanding some seven percent faster than the currently accepted cosmological model described. In this paper we argue that this discrepancy can be eliminated by…
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…
Cosmological discoveries over the past century have completely changed our picture of our place in the universe. New observations have a realistic chance of probing nature on heretofore unimaginable scales, and as a result are changing the…
Scientists have measured that what we can see of space is about a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (10^81) times the volume of an average human. Inflationary theory suggests that the entirety of space…
The universe we see gives every sign of being composed of matter. This is considered a major unsolved problem in theoretical physics. Using the mathematical modeling based on the algebra ${\bf{T}} := {\bf{C}}\otimes{\bf{H}}\otimes{\bf{O}}$,…