English

A Note on Infinities in Eternal Inflation

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2010-02-05 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

In some well-known scenarios of open-universe eternal inflation, developed by Vilenkin and co-workers, a large number of universes nucleate and thermalize within the eternally inflating mega-universe. According to the proposal, each universe nucleates at a point, and therefore the boundary of the nucleated universe is a space-like surface nearly coincident with the future light cone emanating from the point of nucleation, all points of which have the same proper-time. This leads the authors to conclude that at the proper-time t = t_{nuc} at which any such nucleation occurs, an infinite open universe comes into existence. We point out that this is due entirely to the supposition of the nucleation occurring at a single point, which in light of quantum cosmology seems difficult to support. Even an infinitesimal space-like length at the moment of nucleation gives a rather different result -- the boundary of the nucleating universe evolves in proper-time and becomes infinite only in an infinite time. The alleged infinity is never attained at any finite time.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1001.4590,
  title  = {A Note on Infinities in Eternal Inflation},
  author = {George F. R. Ellis and William R. Stoeger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.4590},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

13 pages and 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T14:39:24.078Z