III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

1. Quantum Cosmology Theoretic Unity

Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Relativity. Time. December 31, 1999. The British physicist and author provides succinct review of modern physics as written for the Albert Einstein “Person of the Century” issue.

Hawking, Stephen. Godel and the End of Physics. http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/strings02/dirac/hawking. A talk of March 9, 2009 at Texas A&M University at the inauguration of its Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics. Hawking sets aside his advocacy of a final theory that natural reality could be reduced to, for this has not worked out. The upshot is a particulate physics in conceptual disarray. Quantum gravity is central to the remedy, along with a recognition of black hole information limits. And please note herein Stuart Kauffman’s new essay “Towards a Post Reductionist Science: The Open Universe” which takes off from Hawking to propose a Darwinian kind of cosmic emergence.

Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam, 2010. When I thought it could not get worse appears this year’s science bestseller with a final paragraph epitaph. One wonders how much is due to the iconic Hawking, or Mlodinow, whose prior book was the Drunkard’s Walk about how nature’s hopeless unpredictability. The present work has rightly been denounced as neither Grand nor a Design, the muddled last hurrah of a Ptolemaic physics. Are people just “mere,” or infinitely more in a Copernican genesis universe?

M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find. The fact that we human beings – who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature – have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph. (181)

Hawking, Stephen and Thomas Hertog. Populating the Landscape: A Top-Down Approach. Physical Review D. 73/123527, 2006. The legendary British physicist, in collaboration with CERN researcher Hertog, argue that a better way to contemplate our evolving cosmos is from what (or whom) it has developed into, namely we as observers, rather than assuming all states to be determined by and follow from particular initial conditions. This important if difficult paper is reviewed in Science. 442/988, 2006, Physics Today. October 2006, 9, and Physics World. August 2006, 4.

A central idea that underlies the top-down approach is the interplay between the fundamental laws of nature and the operation of chance in a quantum universe. In top-down cosmology, the structure and complexity of alternative universes in the landscape is predictable from first principles to some extent, but also determined by the outcome of quantum accidents over the course of their histories. (123527-8)

Hogan, Craig. The Beginning of Time. Science. 295/2223, 2002. The latest observations from the COBE and MAP satellites connect cosmos and quantum through a vast inflation of the universe in its first instants. These findings accord with the multiverse scenario along with its holographic properties.

The blotchy pattern in the map, which represents tiny variations in radiation brightness, is caused by small-amplitude perturbations in the structure of space-time that stretch across billions of light years of space today; they are the largest structures we will ever be able to see…It now seems likely that these structures may also be magnified images of the smallest things we will ever be able to see. The pattern is a faithful image of quantum fields - individual elementary particles whose imprint was frozen into the fabric of space-time very early and was then stretched to enormous size by cosmic expansion. Similar fluctuations led to the gravitational formation of all astronomical structure we see today, including our own Galaxy and its stars and planets. (2223)

Ibata, Rodrigo and Geraint Lewis. The Cosmic Web in Our Own Backyard. Science. 319/50, 2008. Celestial matter has been lately found to form an intricate, thickening pattern in the likeness of a filamentary network. This lead article in a special section discusses its presence and implications in our galactic neighborhood.

Ijjas, Anna. Numerical Relativity as a New Tool for Fundamental Cosmology. arXiv:2201.03752. The astrophysicist author is presently at the NYU Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, after stints at Princeton University, MPI Gravitational Physics and elsewhere. Here she as one woman proposes a complementary mathematical approach by which to expand and advance this celestial Earthwise project to quantify and describe the depth and breadth of our galactic universe. See also The End of Expansion by AI, Cosmin Andrei and Paul Steinhardt at 2201.07704 and Smoothing and flattening the universe through slow contraction versus inflation at arXiv:2404.00867 for a latest update.

Advances in our understanding of the origin, evolution and structure of the universe have long been driven by cosmological perturbation theory, model building and effective field theory. In this review, we introduce numerical relativity as a powerful new complementary method. To illustrate its power, we discuss applications to the robustness of slow contraction and inflation in homogenizing, isotropizing and flattening the universe from generic original conditions. These studies have revealed a novel, non-linear smoothing based on ultralocality that challenges the conventional view on what is required to explain the large-scale homogeneity and isotropy of the observable universe. (Abstract)

Javarone, Marco and Giuliano Armano. Quantum-Classical Transitions in Complex Networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics. Online April, 2013. As these earlier fields of physics presently merge with nonlinear systems science, since both study the same phenomena, life’s dynamic intricacies can become joined with and understood via classical and quantum theories. Here University of Cagliari, Italy physicists contend that since nature and society from “biological cells to the World Wide Web” is composed of many, non-equilibrium, interacting elements, they can be modeled by way of Bose nets and Fermi-Dirac statistics. So it really is a small world and a truly unified lively universe.

This paper shows that the emergence of different structures in complex networks, such as the scale-free and the winner-takes-all networks, can be represented in terms of a quantum–classical transition for quantum gases. In particular, we propose a model of fermionic networks that allows us to investigate the network evolution and its dependence on the system temperature. Simulations, performed in accordance with the cited model, clearly highlight the separation between classical random and winner-takes-all networks, in full correspondence with the separation between classical and quantum regions for quantum gases. (Abstract)

Fermionic networks show that the emergence of a scale-free structure can be represented as a quantum-classical transition for quantum gases. In particular, a scale-free network correspond to a fermionic gas approximated by the quantum regime at low temperatures. On the other hand, a simple random network corresponds to the same gas in classical regime at high temperatures. Similar considerations about the connection between classical random and scale-free networks have been proposed in Ref. [8]. The authors show that, in the cold regime, their network is scale-free, but as the temperature increases, the network loses its metric structure and its hierarchical heterogeneous organization {becoming a classical random network. Considering that many real complex networks are scale-free and others have not this structure, see Ref. [14], we deem that the proposed fermionic model can be considered a good candidate for representing their evolution, at low and high temperatures, respectively. (11)

Kaiser, David. When Fields Collide. Scientific American. June, 2007. A Harvard historian of science recounts the 1970s and 1980s convergence of particle physics and the quantum origin of the universe.

Kallosh, Renata and Andrei Linde. Hybrid Cosmological Attractors. arXiv:2204.02425.. We record this latest post from the esteemed Stanford University wife and husband physicists who have continued for four decades to study how the universe seems to have begun in an explosive instant. In regard, in September 1983 I attended at Harvard the first public lecture (overhead slides) that Andrei Linde gave since coming to the USA from Russia.

We construct α-attractor versions of hybrid inflation models. In these models, the potential of the inflation field φ is uplifted by the potential of the second field χ. This uplifting ends due to a tachyonic instability with respect to the field χ, which appears when φ becomes smaller than some critical value φc. In the large N limit, these models have the standard universal α-attractor predictions. This provides significant flexibility, which can be very welcome in view of the rapidly growing amount and precision of the cosmological data. Our main result is not specific to the hybrid inflation models. (Excerpt)

Kallosh, Renate and Andrei Linde. Landscape of Modular Cosmology. arXiv:2411.07552. The renowned Russian-American, Stanford University physicists continue their travels on cosmic theoretical pathways into a fifth decade. As I have noted, in September 1983 at Harvard I heard AL deliver his first public lecture in the USA (overhead slides of a bubbly fractal multiverse).

We investigate the global structure of the recently discovered family of SL(2,Z)-invariant potentials describing inflationary α-attractors. These potentials have an inflationary plateau consisting of the fundamental domain and its images fully covering the upper part of the Poincaré half-plane. Meanwhile, the lower part of the half-plane is covered by an infinitely large number of ridges, which, at first glance, are too sharp to support inflation. However, we show that this apparent sharpness is just an illusion created by hyperbolic geometry, and each of these ridges is physically equivalent to the inflationary plateau in the upper part of the Poincaré half-plane. (Abstract)

Karlsson, Torgny, et al. Pre-Galactic Metal Enrichment: The Chemical Signatures of the First Stars. Reviews of Modern Physics. Online April, 2013. Also available at arXiv:1101.4024, spatial and temporal cosmic reaches are newly accessible whereof astronomers Karlsson and Joss Bland-Hawthorn, University of Sydney, with Volker Bromm, University of Texas at Austin, can detect chemical signatures from Galactic halos, Low mass galaxies, impacting Star clusters, primordial nucleosynthesis, and so on. Whom then altogether might we prodigies be, a sapient personsphere, as the phenomenal way our universe tries to describe and discover itself?

The emergence of the first sources of light at redshifts of z ~ 10-30 signaled the transition from the simple initial state of the Universe to one of increasing complexity. We review recent progress in our understanding of the formation of the first stars and galaxies, starting with cosmological initial conditions, primordial gas cooling, and subsequent collapse and fragmentation. We emphasize the important open question of how the pristine gas was enriched with heavy chemical elements in the wake of the first supernovae. We conclude by discussing how the chemical abundance patterns conceivably allow us to probe the properties of the first stars and subsequent stellar generations, and allow us to test models of early metal enrichment. (Abstract)

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