Ludovico said:
Yes, I am a cinematographer - how does that relate to cosmology?Creativity?
can't be sure, there are all sorts of cinematographers including those without much imagination who just do routine docs, but my feeling is that it goes along with
dramatic sense
visual imagination
a feel for the underlying story line
cosmology is undergoing two quick revolutions in succession
1. is the 1998 revolution sparked by the supernova observations that showed accelerated expansion----thus a positive cosmological constant or some kind of dark energy.
the cosmological constant is denoted Lambda (\Lambda) and the 1998 revolution led to the general acceptance of the CDM-Lambda model.
after which it looked like things were not going to change any more for a while----we would just be left with a couple of riddles like What is Lambda? and What is the CDM (cold dark matter)? And maybe particle physicists would help explain what those things were---find particles etc.
2. But it didn't settle down after the 1998 revolution. for instance, in 2001 Bojowald published "Absence of Singularity in Loop Quantum Cosmology" and that helped to get a second revolution rolling.
Bojowald is a young researcher formerly Ashtekar's postdoc and he is more aggressive, Ashtekar is more conservative-----after some years of thinking about it he confirms. It takes both kinds.
Actually if you want, take a look at this Bojowald paper or at least the one-paragraph summary at the beginning (words not equations)
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0601085
It is long, but the one-paragraph summary gives the gist and is not all that hard to understand. I will copy it here and highlight some key phrases:
"Quantum gravity is expected to be necessary in order to understand situations where classical general relativity breaks down. In particular in cosmology one has to deal with initial singularities, i.e.
the fact that the backward evolution of a classical space-time inevitably comes to an end after a finite amount of proper time. This presents a breakdown of the classical picture and requires an extended theory for a meaningful description. Since small length scales and high curvatures are involved, quantum effects must play a role. Not only the singularity itself but also the surrounding space-time is then modified. One particular realization is loop quantum cosmology, an application of loop quantum gravity to homogeneous systems,
which removes classical singularities. Its implications can be studied at different levels. Main effects are introduced into effective classical equations which allow to avoid interpretational problems of quantum theory. They give rise to new kinds of early universe phenomenology with applications to inflation and cyclic models.
To resolve classical singularities and to understand the structure of geometry around them, the quantum description is necessary. Classical evolution is then replaced by a difference equation for a wave function
which allows to extend space-time beyond classical singularities. One main question is how these homogeneous scenarios are related to full loop quantum gravity, which can be dealt with at the level of distributional symmetric states. Finally, the new structure of space-time arising in loop quantum gravity and its application to cosmology sheds new light on more general issues such as time."
there is a story here, about a handful of explorers, and about people gradually changing the way they picture the history of their universe
