Abstract
The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe fundamental physics, the rationale being to start from fundamental physics inspired models and explore their consequences in sufficient quantitative detail to be able to identify key astrophysical and cosmological tests of the underlying theory (or developing new tests when appropriate). An unprecedented number of such tests will be possible in the coming years, by exploiting the ever improving observational data. In this spirit I will highlight some open issues in cosmology and particle physics and provide some motivation for this symposium.
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Acknowledgements
I acknowledge discussions with a number of collaborators and colleagues—Silvia Galli, Gemma Luzzi, João Magueijo, Elisabetta Majerotto, Gianpiero Mangano, Alessandro Melchiorri, Eloisa Menegoni, Paolo Molaro, Michael Murphy, Nelson Nunes, Pedro Pedrosa, Patrick Petitjean, Georg Robbers, Rodger Thompson and Wim Ubachs—which have shaped my views on this subject. This work is funded by a Ciência2007 Research Contract, supported by FSE and POPH-QREN funds. Further support came from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal, through grant PTDC/CTE-AST/098604/2008.
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Martins, C.J.A.P. (2011). Astrophysical Probes of Fundamental Physics. In: Martins, C., Molaro, P. (eds) From Varying Couplings to Fundamental Physics. Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19397-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19397-2_1
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