Related papers: The Scaled Universe
A general method is presented which allows one to determine from the local gauge invariant observables of a quantum field theory the underlying particle and symmetry structures appearing at the lower (ultraviolet) end of the…
Scales of the microworld are defined on the grounds of the hierarchy that can be set up within a well ordered finite or infinite countable set of well ordered sets. Indirect measurements in pure mathematical as well as physical meaning are…
This essay is a tour around many of the lesser known pregeometric models of physics, as well as the mainstream approaches to quantum gravity, in search of common themes which may provide a glimpse of the final theory which must lie behind…
The phenomenologically observed flatness - or near flatness - of spacetime cannot be understood as emerging from continuum Planck (or sub-Planck) scales using known physics. Using dimensional arguments it is demonstrated that any…
We review recent findings that the universe on its largest scales shows hints of the violation of statistical isotropy, in particular alignment with the geometry and direction of motion of the solar system, and missing power at scales…
Dynamical systems in nature such as fluid flows, heart beat patterns, rainfall variability, stock market price fluctuations, etc. exhibit selfsimilar fractal fluctuations on all scales in space and time. Power spectral analyses of fractal…
At Planck-scale, spacetime is "foamy" due to quantum fluctuations predicted by quantum gravity. Here we consider the possibility of using spacetime foam-induced phase incoherence of light from distant galaxies and gamma-ray bursters to…
Scaling arguments are used to constrain the angular spectrum of distortions on boundaries of macroscopic causal diamonds, produced by Planck-scale vacuum fluctuations of causally-coherent quantum gravity. The small-angle spectrum of…
We assume that the Universe has a non trivial topology whose compact spatial sections have a volume significantly smaller than the horizon volume. By a topological lens effect, such a "folded" space configuration generates multiple images…
As is well known, structure formation in the Universe at times after decoupling can be described by hydrodynamic equations. These are shown here to be equivalent to a generalization of the stochastic Kardar--Parisi--Zhang equation with…
Fractal properties are usually characterized by means of various statistical tools which deal with spatial average quantities. Here we focus on the determination of fluctuations around the average counts and we develop a test for the study…
We study the expansion of the universe at late times in the case that the cosmological constant obeys certain scaling laws motivated by renormalisation group running in quantum theories. The renormalisation scale is identified with the…
A conserved cosmological perturbation is associated with each quantity whose local evolution is determined entirely by the local expansion of the Universe. It may be defined as the appropriately normalised perturbation of the quantity,…
We derive an expression for the luminosity distance in a perturbed Friedmann universe. We define the correlation function and the power spectrum of the luminosity distance fluctuations and express them in terms of the initial spectrum of…
Planck-scale physics challenges the classical smooth-spacetime picture by introducing quantum fluctuations that imply a nontrivial spacetime microstructure. We present a framework that encodes these fluctuations by promoting local scale…
We study statistical properties of galaxy structures in several samples extracted from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. In particular, we measured conditional fluctuations by means of the scale-length method and determined their probability…
A quantum theory of the universe consists of a theory of its quantum dynamics and a theory of its quantum state The theory predicts quantum multiverses in the form of decoherent sets of alternative histories describing the evolution of the…
We discuss the physical interpretation of unparticles and review the constraints from cosmology. Unparticles may be understood in terms of confined states of a strongly-coupled scale-invariant theory, where scale-invariance implies that the…
A geometric framework for describing quantum particles on a possibly curved background is proposed. Natural constructions on certain distributional bundles (`quantum bundles') over the spacetime manifold yield a quantum ``formalism'' along…
We present a novel theory of the very early universe which addresses the traditional horizon and flatness problems of big bang cosmology and predicts a scale invariant spectrum of perturbations. Unlike inflation, this scenario requires no…