New overview of cosmology for Ashtekar's book

[marcus]

A worldclass cosmologist, Thanu Padmanabhhan, has come out with one of these surveys of cosmology for general audience, that a senior cosmologist may do every now and then. It is going to be a 30 page chapter in Abhay Ashtekar's Einstein Centennial book "A Hundred Years of Relativity"

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0503107
Understanding Our Universe: Current Status and Open Issues
T. Padmanabhan
To appear in "100 Years of Relativity - Space-time Structure: Einstein and Beyond", A.Ashtekar (Editor), World Scientific (Singapore, 2005); 30 pages; 4 figures

"Last couple of decades have been the golden age for cosmology. High quality data confirmed the broad paradigm of standard cosmology but have thrusted upon us a preposterous composition for the universe which defies any simple explanation, thereby posing probably the greatest challenge theoretical physics has ever faced. Several aspects of these developments are critically reviewed, concentrating on conceptual issues and open questions. [Topics discussed include: Cosmological Paradigm, Growth of structures in the universe, Inflation and generation of initial perturbations, Temperature anisotropies of the CMBR, Dark energy, Cosmological Constant, Deeper issues in cosmology.]"

 

[turbo]

Can't wait!

 

[marcus]

hello turbo, I trust you are NOT waiting, then, but will go ahead and read
whatever chapters of the book become available as preprints.
Please let me know if you see other chapters appear on arxiv and i miss them

one of the chapters in Ashtekar's book will be by martin bojowald, of LQC fame.

 

[turbo]

hello turbo, I trust you are NOT waiting, then, but will go ahead and read
whatever chapters of the book become available as preprints.
Please let me know if you see other chapters appear on arxiv and i miss them

one of the chapters in Ashtekar's book will be by martin bojowald, of LQC fame.

I just got the chance to read the preprint, and am intriqued by the direction he takes when addressing the deeper problems involving vacuum energy and gravitation, especially the treatment of the local vacuum field as a Gaussian-style reference frame. It is just this concept that has led me to model the CMB as the energy signature of the ZPE field, and to view the WMAP isotropies as artifacts of our galactic proper motion, galactic rotation, proper motion of Sol within its neighborhood, motion of Earth around Sol, etc. When the 2nd year WMAP data becomes available, we should know if this idea has legs.

I'm going to bookmark a Google scholar search of the author and his citations and I'll let you know if other interesting stuff turns up. Thanks for the link!