The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale form. These models offer a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure. The overall uniformity of the Universe, known as the flatness problem, is explained through cosmic inflation: a sudden and very rapid expansion of space during the earliest moments. However, physics currently lacks a widely accepted theory of quantum gravity that can successfully model the earliest conditions of the Big Bang.
Physical cosmology is a branch of cosmology concerned with the study of cosmological models. A cosmological model, or simply cosmology, provides a description of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and allows study of fundamental questions about its origin, structure, evolution, and ultimate fate. Cosmology as a science originated with the Copernican principle, which implies that celestial bodies obey identical physical laws to those on Earth, and Newtonian mechanics, which first allowed those physical laws to be understood.
Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves. He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of aurorae, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial magnetosphere, and the dynamics of plasmas in the Milky Way galaxy.
Eva Silverstein is an American theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and string theorist. She is a professor of physics at Stanford University and director of the Modern Inflationary Cosmology collaboration within the Simons Foundation Origins of the Universe initiative.
Phillip James Edwin Peebles is a Canadian-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and theoretical cosmologist who is currently the Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is widely regarded as one of the world's leading theoretical cosmologists in the period since 1970, with major theoretical contributions to primordial nucleosynthesis, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, and structure formation.
Cosmology is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term cosmology was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's Glossographia, and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher Christian Wolff, in Cosmologia Generalis. Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation myths and eschatology. In the science of astronomy, cosmology is concerned with the study of the chronology of the universe.
Richard Salisbury Ellis is Professor of Astrophysics at the University College London. He previously served as the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was awarded the 2011 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 2022 the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and in 2023 the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.
Andrew R. Liddle is Professor of astrophysics at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. Publications include books and over 260 papers. He is a theoretical cosmologist and is interested in understanding the properties of the Universe and how these relate to fundamental physical laws.
Peter Coles is a theoretical cosmologist at Maynooth University. He studies the large scale structure of our Universe.
Charles L. Bennett is an American observational astrophysicist. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's highly successful Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).
Professor David Lyth is a researcher in particle cosmology at the University of Lancaster. He has published over 165 papers as well as two books on early universe cosmology and cosmological inflation.
The curvaton is a hypothetical elementary particle which mediates a scalar field in early universe cosmology. It can generate fluctuations during inflation, but does not itself drive inflation, instead it generates curvature perturbations at late times after the inflaton field has decayed and the decay products have redshifted away, when the curvaton is the dominant component of the energy density. It is used to generate a flat spectrum of CMB perturbations in models of inflation where the potential is otherwise too steep or in alternatives to inflation like the pre-Big Bang scenario.
The ICG is a research institute at the University of Portsmouth devoted to topics in cosmology, galaxy evolution and gravitation. It has nearly 50 staff, post-docs and students working on subjects from inflation in the early Universe to understanding the stellar populations in galaxies.
The Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) is a Research Institute at Durham University, England. It was founded in November 2002 as part of the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics, which also includes the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP). The ICC's primary mission is to advance fundamental knowledge in cosmology. Topics of active research include: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the evolution of cosmic structure, the formation of galaxies, and the determination of fundamental parameters.
Hume A. Feldman is a physicist specializing in cosmology and astrophysics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Kansas.
Richard Battye is a cosmologist, theoretical physicist and former first-class cricketer. He is currently a Professor of Cosmology at the University of Manchester and has been the associate director (science) in the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics since 2015.
Raul Jimenez Tellado, known professionally as Raul Jimenez, is a cosmologist and theoretical physicist and currently the ICREA Professor of Cosmology at the University of Barcelona. His research interests include the origin and evolution of the Universe, large-scale structure, dark matter, dark energy, inflation, the cosmic microwave background, statistics and Bayesian inference.
Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist and professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is known for his contributions to the studies of cosmic acceleration and dark energy, gravitational lensing, and testing alternatives to general relativity; as well as his authorship of Testing General Relativity in Cosmology, a review article published in Living Reviews in Relativity. He was elected in 2021 as Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) with the quote: "For distinguished contributions to the field of theoretical cosmology, particularly for testing modifications to general relativity at cosmological scales, and for sustained excellence in teaching and mentoring of students."
David Matravers was a British mathematician and cosmologist and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Portsmouth. His research interests were in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Cosmology.