Time varying speed of light as a solution to cosmological puzzles - art. no. 043516.

We consider the cosmological implications of light travelling faster in the early Universe. We propose a prescription for deriving corrections to the cosmological evolution equations while the speed of light c is changing. We then show how the horizon, flatness, and cosmological constant problems ma y be solved. We also study cosmological perturbations in this scenario and show how one may solve the homogeneity and isotropy problems. As it stands, our scenario appears to most easily produce extreme homogeneity, requiring structure to be produced in the standard big bang epoch. Producing signifi cant perturbations during the earlier epoch would require a rather careful design of the function c(t). The large entropy inside the horizon nowadays can also be accounted for in this scenario. [S0556-2821(99)07802-9].