Cosmography: Cosmology without the Einstein equations

By Matt Visser. 2004

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How much of modern cosmology is really cosmography? How much of modern cosmology is independent of the Einstein equations? (Independent of the Friedmann equations?) These questions are becoming increasingly germane—as the models cosmologists use for the stress-energy content of the universe become increasingly baroque, it behaves us to step back a little and carefully disentangle cosmological kinematics from cosmological dynamics. The use of basic symmetry principles (such as the cosmological principle) permits us to do a considerable amount, without ever having to address the vexatious issues of just how much “dark energy”, “dark matter”, “quintessence”, and/or “phantom matter” is needed in order to satisfy the Einstein equations. This is the sub-sector of cosmology that Weinberg refers to as “cosmography”, and in this article I will explore the extent to which cosmography is sufficient for analyzing the Hubble law and so describing many of the features of the universe around us.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b823d0a5ecfe3b4fdb15661cff3d5a4627f17bcc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The Hubble series: convergence properties and redshift variables (2007, background): “As will quickly be verified by looking at the derivation (see, for example, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], the standard Hubble law is actually a Taylor series expansion derived for small z, whereas much of the most interesting recent supernova data occurs at z & 1 [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12].”
A Primer on Energy Conditions (2014, background): “For instance, strongly substantiated cosmographic arguments comparing best estimates for the age of the oldest stars to the epoch of galaxy formation show that the SEC must have been violated in the relatively recent cosmological past (redshift z < 7) (Visser 1997a; Visser 1997b; Visser 2005).”
Spin-half fermions with mass dimension one: theory, phenomenology, and dark matter (2004, background): “Scientific caution suggests [18] that existing data be viewed with dark matter and modifications of gravity at large scales as complementary contributors to the same data.”