Plausible cause and effect of the big bang model are presented without violating conventional laws of physics. The initial cosmological singularity is resolved by introducing the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. We postulate that, preceding the big bang at the end of the gravitational collapse, the total observed mass including all forms of energy of the universe condensed into the prim...

To gain insight in the quantum nature of the big bang, we study the dual field theory description of asymptotically anti-de Sitter solutions of supergravity that have cosmological singularities. The dual theories do not appear to have a stable ground state. One regularization of the theory causes the cosmological singularities in the bulk to turn into giant black holes with scalar hair. We inte...

In two large samples (combined N 1⁄4 31,045), we found a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and political conservatism. This relationship held when controlling for a number of demographic variables as well as the ‘‘Big Five’’ personality traits. Disgust sensitivity was also associated with more conservative voting in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In Study 2, we replicated ...

For those of you who are able to stay a little bit longer in these parts, if you are making your way down south to the wine or big timber country, that is the Warren Blackwood education district of which I have the privilege to be the District Director. The Warren Blackwood is a centre for educational excellence in Western Australia. Schools are in recess at the moment, of course, but if you ar...

New Planck scale physics may solve the singularity problems of classical general relativity and may lead to interesting consequences for very early Universe cosmology. Two approaches to these questions are reviewed in this article. The rst is an eeective action approach to including the eeects of Planck scale physics in the basic framework of general relativity. It is shown that eeective action...

In a recent series of papers, we have shown that theories with scalar fields coupled to gravity (e.g., the standard model) can be lifted to a Weyl-invariant equivalent theory in which it is possible to unambiguously trace the classical cosmological evolution through the transition from big crunch to big bang. The key was identifying a sufficient number of finite, Weyl-invariant conserved quanti...

We study a symmetry, schematically Energy → – Energy, which suppresses matter contributions to the cosmological constant. The requisite negative energy fluctuations are identified with a “ghost” copy of the Standard Model. Gravity explicitly, but weakly, violates the symmetry, and naturalness requires General Relativity to break down at short distances with testable consequences. If this breakd...

We present a brief review of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). We discuss theoretical and observational uncertainties in deuterium and helium-4 primordial abundances and their implications for the determination of important cosmological parameters. We present, moreover, some recent results on active-sterile neutrino oscillations in the early universe and on their effects on BBN.

We study the effect from a general ultralocal supermetric on primordial nucleosynthesis for Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Cosmology. The parameter λ of the supermetric changes the effective number of degrees of freedom, g∗, which modifies the Friedmann equation. This modification produces variations in the production of primordial 4He. The observations of the primordial abundances of light element...

Children Are Good Observers Children learn from actively investigating the world around them. Coming upon a construction site, for instance, a fouryear-old will be curious about the activity. The adult with the child should take the time to stop, really look at what’s going on, and direct the child’s attention to the details. “Let’s watch and see what happens while that dump truck unloads dirt....