No Arabic abstract
Einsteins genius and penetrating physical intuition led to the general theory of relativity, which incorporates gravity into the geometry of spacetime. However, the theory of general relativity leads to perspectives which go far beyond the vision of its creator. Many of these insights came to light only after Einsteins death in 1955. These developments were due to a new breed of relativists, like Penrose, Hawking and Geroch, who approached the subject with a higher degree of mathematical sophistication than earlier workers. Some of these insights were made possible because of work by Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri (AKR) who derived an equation which turned out to be a key ingredient in the singularity theorems of general relativity. This article explains AKRs work in elementary terms.
I give an epistemological analysis of the developments of relativistic cosmology from 1917 to 1966, based on the seminal articles by Einstein, de Sitter, Friedmann, Lemaitre, Hubble, Gamow and other historical figures of the field. It appears that most of the ingredients of the present-day standard cosmological model, including the acceleration of the expansion due to a repulsive dark energy, the interpretation of the cosmological constant as vacuum energy or the possible non-trivial topology of space, had been anticipated by Georges Lemaitre, although his articles remain mostly unquoted.
A recent arXiv manuscript, arXiv:1801.03278, claims that a cosmic background radiation with a black body temperature of $T_{rm BB}$ ~ 500 K (440 F) was just barely visible to human eyes, thus fixing the onset of the Dark Ages at about 5 million years post recombination. This claim presents an insurmountable biophysical challenge, since even hotter bodies, such as 450 F pizzas, do not seem to be glowing in the dark. As volunteer referees we show that this claim is the result of employing an incorrect assumption. Via a corrected analysis we find that the Dark Ages must have had a significantly earlier start. A second, more descriptive claim, that a cosmic background radiation with $T_{rm BB}$ of 1545 K was as blinding to humans as is our own Sun, is based on the same assumption and may have to be revised.
We discuss the possibility of producing a significant fraction of dark matter in the form of primordial black holes in the context of the pre-big bang inflationary scenario. We take into account, to this purpose, the enhancement of curvature perturbations possibly induced by a variation of the sound-speed parameter $c_s$ during the string phase of high-curvature inflation. After imposing all relevant observational constraints, we find that the considered class of models is compatible with the production of a large amount of primordial black holes in the mass range relevant to dark matter, provided the sound-speed parameter is confined in a rather narrow range of values, $0.003 < c_s < 0.01$.
The large-$N$ master field of the Lorentzian IIB matrix model can, in principle, give rise to a particular degenerate metric relevant to a regularized big bang. The length parameter of this degenerate metric is then calculated in terms of the IIB-matrix-model length scale.
Several scenarios have been proposed in which primordial perturbations could originate from quantum vacuum fluctuations in a phase corresponding to a collapse phase (in an Einstein frame) preceding the Big Bang. I briefly review three models which could produce scale-invariant spectra during collapse: (1) curvature perturbations during pressureless collapse, (2) axion field perturbations in a pre big bang scenario, and (3) tachyonic fields during multiple-field ekpyrotic collapse. In the separate universes picture one can derive generalised perturbation equations to describe the evolution of large scale perturbations through a semi-classical bounce, assuming a large-scale limit in which inhomogeneous perturbations can be described by locally homogeneous patches. For adiabatic perturbations there exists a conserved curvature perturbation on large scales, but isocurvature perturbations can change the curvature perturbation through the non-adiabatic pressure perturbation on large scales. Different models for the origin of large scale structure lead to different observational predictions, including gravitational waves and non-Gaussianity.