相关论文: Life, the Universe, and almost Everything: Signs o…
The history of life on Earth and in other potential life-bearing planetary platforms is deeply linked to the history of the universe. Since life as we know it relies on chemical elements forged in dying heavy stars, the universe needs to be…
It is argued that human consciousness is likely to have emerged during the self-consistent evolution of the physical universe, through the gradual accumulation of biological entities' ability to tap into the intrinsic non-deterministic…
Did the universe have a beginning or does it exist forever, i.e. is it eternal at least in relation to the past? This fundamental question was a main topic in ancient philosophy of nature and the Middle Ages. Philosophically it was more or…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…
I am most honoured to have the privilege to present the Foreword to this fascinating and wonderfully varied collection of contributions, concerning the nature of computation and of its deep connection with the operation of those basic laws,…
The aim of this thesis is to question some of the basic assumptions that go into building the $\Lambda$CDM model of our universe. The assumptions we focus on are the initial conditions of the universe, the fundamental forces in the universe…
According to the standard model of cosmology, the arrangement of matter in the cosmos on scales much larger than galaxies is entirely specified by the initial conditions laid down during inflation. But zooming in by dozens of orders of…
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.…
The evidence for a Big Bang origin of the Universe is truly compelling, though its cause remains a complete mystery. As the cosmic spacetime is revealed to us with ever improving detail, however, we are beginning to refine the range of its…
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…
To better understand the deep significance of our best physical theories it could be interesting to compare our Universe with its models. It may happen that the differences between the model and reality can be made indistinguishable, to the…
In order to account for the observable Universe, any comprehensive theory or model of cosmology must draw from many disciplines of physics, including gauge theories of strong and weak interactions, the hydrodynamics and microphysics of…
The established cosmological theory which describes the history of the Universe since shortly after the "Big Bang" until today is remarkably successful. Thanks to the increasing precision of available observational data, we are now able to…
The discovery of the present accelerated expansion of space changed everything regarding cosmology and life's ultimate prospects. Both the optimistic scenarios of an ever (but decelerated) expanding universe and of a collapsing universe…
The self-tuning brane scenario is an attempt to solve the cosmological constant problem in the context of extra dimensions. Rather than making the vacuum energy small, this approach proceeds by removing the gravitational effect of vacuum…
Fine-tuning studies whether some physical parameters, or relevant ratios between them, are located within so-called life-permitting intervals of small probability outside of which carbon-based life would not be possible. Recent developments…
Cosmologists wish to explain how our Universe, in all its complexity, could ever have come about. For that, we assess the number of states in our Universe now. This plays the role of entropy in thermodynamics of the Universe, and reveals…
In this paper we discuss a cosmological model for a universe with self-regulating features. We set up the theoretical framework for the model and determine the time evolution of the scale-factor $a(t)$. It is shown that such a universe…
Fine-tuning in physics and cosmology is often used as evidence that a theory is incomplete. For example, the parameters of the standard model of particle physics are "unnaturally" small (in various technical senses), which has driven much…
Despite impressive phenomenological successes, cosmological models are incomplete without an understanding of what happened at the big bang singularity. Depending on the model, one would like to understand how appropriate initial conditions…