相关论文: The Creation of the World - According to Science
How did it all begin? Although this question has undoubtedly lingered for as long as humans have walked the Earth, the answer still eludes us. Yet since my grandparents were born, scientists have been able to refine this question to a…
Every society has a story rooted in its most ancient traditions, of how the earth and sky originated. Most of these stories attribute the origin of all things to a Creator - whether God, Element or Idea. We first recall that in the Western…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
The question of first-cause has troubled philosophers and cosmologists alike. Now that it is apparent that our universe began in a Big Bang explosion, the question of what happened before the Big Bang arises. Inflation seems like a very…
An introductory account is given of the understanding of the structure of the universe. At present the most plausible theory of the origin of the universe is that it formed from the explosion of an extremely hot and dense fireball several…
Observations made using large ground-based and space-borne telescopes have probed cosmic history all the way from the present-day to a time when the Universe was less than a tenth of its present age. Earlier on lies the remaining frontier,…
We "explain", using a Classical approach, how the Universe was created out of "nothing", i.e., with no input of initial energy. This is a Universe with no-initial infinite singularity of energy density.
In the inflationary scenario all the matter constituting the universe was created from the process of reheating after inflation. Recent development of the theory of reheating is briefly reviewed. The list of topics includes elementary…
One of the big problems of the age concerns 'Global Warming', and whether it is 'man-made' or 'natural'. Most climatologists believe that it is very likely to be the former but some scientists (mostly non-climatologists) subscribe to the…
Over the past century, rooted in the theory of general relativity, cosmology has developed a very successful physical model of the universe: the {\em big-bang model}. Its construction followed different stages to incorporate nuclear…
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…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
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…
The `Little Bangs' made in particle collider experiments reproduce the conditions in the Big Bang when the age of the Universe was a fraction of a second. It is thought that matter was generated, the structures in the Universe were formed…
There is no mysterious link between mathematics and physics, because both of them are human inventions designed to study the world.
It is conjectured that dark matter (DM) was produced before inflation from neutral particles present after the Big Bang and survived inflation due to a specific coupling with gravitation, while the charged particles existing after the Big…
This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us…
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…
Over the past decade, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter. The observational evidence for the existence of dark matter is reviewed: rotation curves of galaxies, weak lensing…
We explain how the Universe was created with no expenditure of energy or initial mass.