Inhomogeneity effects in Cosmology

This article looks at how inhomogeneous spacetime models may be significant for cosmology. First it looks at how the averaging process may affect large scale dynamics, with backreaction effects leading to effective contributions to the averaged energy-momentum tensor. Secondly it considers how local inhomogeneities may affect cosmological observations in cosmology, possibly significantly affecting the concordance model parameters. Thirdly it presents the possibility that the universe is spatially inhomogeneous on Hubble scales, with a violation of the Copernican principle leading to an apparent acceleration of the universe. This could perhaps even remove the need for the postulate of dark energy.Comment: 29 pages. For special issue of CQG on inhomogeneous cosmologie

Cosmology and Local Physics

This article is dedicated to the memory of Dennis Sciama. It revisits a series of issues to which he devoted much time and effort, regarding the relationship between local physics and the large scale structure of the universe - in particular, Olber's paradox, Mach's principle, and the various arrows of time. Thus the focus is various ways in which local physics is influenced by the universe itself.Comment: 20 pages LaTe

On the paradox of Hawking radiation in a maximally extended Schwarzschild solution

This paper considers the effect of Hawking radiation on an eternal black hole - that is. a maximally extended Schwarzschild solution. Symmetry considerations that hold independent of the details of the emission mechanism show there is an inconsistency in the claim that such a blackhole evaporates away in a finite time. In essence: because the external domain is static, there is an infinite time available for the process to take place, so whenever the evaporation process is claimed to come to completion, it should have happened earlier. The problem is identified to lie in the claim that the locus of emission of Hawking radiation lies just outside the globally defined event horizon. Rather, the emission domain must be mainly located inside the event horizon, so most of the Hawking radiation ends up at this singularity rather than at infinity and the black hole never evaporates away. This result supports a previous claim [arXiv:1310.4771] that astrophysical black holes do not evaporate.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1310.477

The Emergent Universe: inflationary cosmology with no singularity

Observations indicate that the universe is effectively flat, but they do not rule out a closed universe. The role of positive curvature is negligible at late times, but can be crucial in the early universe. In particular, positive curvature allows for cosmologies that originate as Einstein static universes, and then inflate and later reheat to a hot big bang era. These cosmologies have no singularity, no "beginning of time", and no horizon problem. If the initial radius is chosen to be above the Planck scale, then they also have no quantum gravity era, and are described by classical general relativity throughout their history.Comment: minor changes; version to appear in Class Q Gra