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Cosmic Reading List: The Past Hypothesis

Updated 14.Sep.08
  1. For Sep.10: Price, H. 2002. "Boltzmann's time bomb" (PDF).

  2. For Sep.10: Callender, C. 2003. "There Is No Puzzle About The Low Entropy Past" (DOC).

  3. For Sep.17: Callendar, C. "The Past Hypothesis Meets Graivty" (DOC). Discussion will focus on this reading.

  4. For Sep.17: Earman, J. 2006. "The `Past Hypothesis': Not even false" (Science Direct).

  5. For Sep.24:> Carroll, S. and J. Chen. 2005. "Does Inflation Provide Natural Initial Conditions for the Universe" (arXiv:gr-qc/0505037)

Other Cosmic Materials
Updated 02.Sep.08
  1. Methodologies in the Philosophy of Physics (TXT | RTF). A list prepared to guide research projects. (29.Aug.08)

  2. Why Lambda is Equivalent to Dark Energy (PDF). A brief one-pager that discusses how Lambda can be interpreted as energy in the vacuum. (03.Sep.08)

  3. Bryan's Cosmic Map (PDF), plotting the various kinds of arguments made in response to the accelerated expansion problem.


Old Reading List: Cosmic Acceleration

Updated 02.Sep.08
  1. Carroll, Sean. 2001. The Cosmological Constant

  2. Blanchard et al. 2003. An alternative to the cosmological `concordance model.' The approach is to argue that the data suggesting `expansion' has not been correctly interpreted. This particular proposal does not seem to fit well with empirical observations. However, it is illustrative this approach to the problem.

  3. Carroll, Sean. 2003. Why is the Universe Accelerating? A very introductory survery article, which intrdouces Weinberg's `paradox' as well as several of the approaches to the expansion problem (as of the time of writing).

  4. Carroll et al. 2003. Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due to New Gravitational Physics?

  5. Bean et al. 2005. Insights into Dark Energy: Interplay Between Theory and Observation

  6. Albrecht et al. 2007. Report of the Dark Energy Task Force

  7. Frieman et al. 2008. Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe

  8. Lindler, Eric. 2008. Mapping the Cosmological Expansion

  9. Wiltshire, David. 2008. Dark energy without dark energy

  10. Bolejko & Wyithe. 2008. Testing the Copernican Principle via Cosmological Observations. The authors propose a set of models in which the Copernican principle is violated as solutions to the cosmic expansion problem. They thus think that we have misinterpreted our data because we assumed this principle. The tough part for them is to guarantee that their models meet the requirements of CMB observations; however, they claim that this hurdle can be met.