Recent content by LithiumHelios

This is actually a more technical question than the initial responses and question seem to assume. The appropriate framework for this question is quantum field theory in curved spacetime (or quantum theories for gravitation). There are others on the forum who are much more proficient and...

Perhaps it would be useful if you provide a link to references or the such that outlines where GR as a framework breaks down? For solar system scales and other scales we have direct access to then GR makes fantastically accurate predictions. Extrapolating GR to cosmological scales introduces...

In addition to Cristo's comments it's worth emphasising that most people view GR as an effective field theory (i.e. it's fundamentally incomplete/no self-consistent or complete theories of quantum gravity/etc) and many modifications to GR are motivated by UV (~ high energy/small scales) and IR...

It may be worth looking at some of the classical papers on vacuum decays and false vacua such as: http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v15/i10/p2929_1 http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v21/i12/p3305_1 http://www.springerlink.com/content/v77280v32825v618/...

There are possible projects in using Galaxy surveys/clustering to constrain and measure the bispectrum of primordial fluctuations? Would allow you to explore particle physics models for inflation as well as the applications to large scale structure? http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.3224...

http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5855 You can find some on the arXiv. (Not that I've particularly read any of them though...)

The alternatives to adiabatic are usually along the lines of 'isocurvature' fluctuations etc. Just in case you were interested here are a few interesting links: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9610219" http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0261" http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0547" (This has a clearer...

It is usually used in the context of the density perturbations. In particular the density perturbations will be the same for all constituent components of the Universe: \frac{\delta \rho_a}{(\rho_a + \bar{\rho})} will be the same for all components (enumerated by 'a') where \bar{\rho} is...

Article by Barrow et al may be worth reading: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1985MNRAS.213..917B

Ruth Durrer's book on the CMB has a decent discussion of SVT decomposition in the context of cosmological perturbation theory.

The general answer to your question will probably come down to the model you choose to solve a number of well known problems with the vanilla cosmological model (I'll throw down some math at the very bottom): 1) Homogeneity problem - why is the Universe so homogeneous on large scales? 2)...

1) The h is there to convey the error in the measurement of Hubble's constant. At least that's what I assume your talking about. E.g. you could have (nothing physical here): r = 100h km where h would conventionally be taken to be ~ 0.72 if we have a Hubble constant of: H = 72 \pm (...

Or you can see or own galaxy in most near radio images... See: http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4555 http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4538 http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/pub_papers/sevenyear/foreground/wmap_7yr_foreground_images.cfm...

I really liked http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521869633/?tag=pfamazon01-20 book. Also worth looking at: Griffith's book, http://www.amazon.com/dp/1891389629/?tag=pfamazon01-20 book which I thought looked quite neat. Also Ballentine as a more formal/graduate quantum book.

Most systematic way would, probably, be to work through one of the canonical textbooks for cosmology (e.g. Dodelson, Peacock, Coles, Liddle and Lyth, Mukhanov, and so on). One of the problems with cosmology is that it quite often invokes a range of disciplines from physicss. In a very general...