Did the universe have a beginning?
High Energy Physics - Theory
2012-04-23 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Abstract
We discuss three candidate scenarios which seem to allow the possibility that the universe could have existed forever with no initial singularity: eternal infation, cyclic evolution, and the emergent universe. The first two of these scenarios are geodesically incomplete to the past, and thus cannot describe a universe without a beginning. The third, although it is stable with respect to classical perturbations, can collapse quantum mechanically, and therefore cannot have an eternal past.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1204.4658,
title = {Did the universe have a beginning?},
author = {Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.4658},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
6 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the Proceedings of the 10th Incternational Conference on Gravitation, Astrophysics and Cosmology, Quy-Nhon, Vietnam, December 2011