The Big Bang, Modern Cosmology and the Fate of the Universe: Impacts upon Culture

Cosmological discoveries over the past century have completely changed our picture of our place in the universe. New observations have a realistic chance of probing nature on heretofore unimaginable scales, and as a result are changing the nature of fundamental science. Perhaps no other domain of science has an equal capacity to completely change our perspective of the world in which we live.Comment: Invited Lecture, UNESCO/IAU Meeting: The Role of Astronomy in Society and Culture Jan 2009, to appear, IAU Proceedings, D. Valls-Gaubaud and A. Boksenberg, eds.. (Several typos removed in this version

A New Cosmological Paradigm: the Cosmological Constant and Dark Matter

The Standard Cosmological Model of the 1980's is no more. I describe the definitive evidence that the density of matter is insufficient to result in a flat universe, as well as the mounting evidence that the cosmological constant is not zero. I finally discuss the implications of these results for particle physics and direct searches for non-baryonic dark matter, and demonstrate that the new news is good news.Comment: 11 pages, latex, including 4 embedded figs. Based on invited lectures at PASCOS98, Boston; Tropical Workshop on Particle Physics and Cosmology and Particle Physics, San Juan; WEIN 98, Santa Fe. To appear in these proceeding

Space, Time, and Matter: Cosmological Parameters 2001

Over the past three years, our confidence in the inferred values of cosmological parameters has increased dramatically, confirming that the flat matter dominated Universe that dominated cosmological model building for the past 20 years does not correspond to the Universe in which we live. I review recent developments here and quote best fit current values for fundamental cosmological parameters.Comment: 19 pages, figures included. (Invited Review Lecture: Third International Conference on the Identification of Dark Matter, York, England, Sept 2000 - to appear in Proceedings

The State of the Universe: Cosmological Parameters 2002

In the past decade, observational cosmology has had one of the most exciting periods in the past century. The precision with which we have been able to measure cosmological parameters has increased tremendously, while at the same time, we have been surprised beyond our wildest dreams by the results. I review here recent measurements of the expansion rate, geometry, age, matter content, and equation of state of the universe, and discuss the implications for our understanding of cosmology.Comment: 20 pages, To appear in Proceedings, ESO-CERN-ESA Symposium on Astronomy, Cosmology and Fundamental Physics, March 2002. Typo in final table fixe

Gravitational Lensing and the Variability of G

The four observables associated with gravitational lensing of distant quasars by intervening galaxies: image splittings, relative amplifications, time delays, and optical depths, provide separate measures of the strength of the gravitational constant $G$ at cosmological distances. These allow one, in principle, to factor out unknown lensing parameters to directly to probe the variation of $G$ over cosmological time. We estimate constraints on $\dot{G}$ which may be derivable by this method both now and in the future. The limits one may obtain can compete or exceed other direct limits on $\dot{G}$ today, but unfortunately extracting this information, is not independent of the effort to fix other cosmological parameters such as $H_0$ and $\Omega_0$ from lensing observations.Comment: 13 pages plus figures (not included

Long-lived π-cation radicals of bilindionato zinc complexes

The title compounds have been prepared by I 2-oxidation in benzene-pyridine solutions and characterized by uv-vis and esr spectroscopy