Cosmological Modeling: Its History and Use in Fundamental Physics Research
The majority of my work to date concerns the relationship between our ever-improving understanding of large scale structure in cosmology and ongoing fundamental physics research.
I have broadly organized my work on this subject into four categories, listed below with suggestive labels. Clicking on a category will bring you to a new page with the relevant titles and abstracts.
Standard lore has it that most everything theoretically interesting or novel about the future theory of quantum gravity is far beyond our present empirical reach, and so quantum gravity research is not only theoretical, but largely unconstrained by ongoing empirical research. Some of my work pushes back against this lore.
The ‘trans-Planckian censorship’ conjecture was recently introduced to researchers working at the intersection of fundamental physics and large-scale cosmology, garnering immediate controversy. Some of my current work develops the philosophical foundations for the conjecture: why it is exciting in the course of ongoing research toward a theory of quantum gravity, why might one be brought to speculate in its favor, etc.
Some of my research concerns the role of quantum cosmology in our leveraging current physics to create a future theory of quantum gravity, especially in the wake of a positive cosmological constant. One difficult, open question here concerns the relationship that obtains between the ‘Cosmological Constant Problem’ and global spacetime structure in the semiclassical limit of quantum gravity — two topics that feature prominently in my research summarized here.
Relativistic, expanding universe cosmology developed very quickly in the early 1930s, and with some slight notable caveats, we have never since found reason to abandon its core. Some of my work concerns the early history of cosmologists’ thinking within this tradition, to better understand how fundamental physicists grew accustomed over the past century to embracing the standard ΛCDM model of cosmology today as a detailed empirical narrative of our large-scale cosmic circumstance.