English

One Bubble to Rule Them All

High Energy Physics - Theory 2018-01-18 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Quantum Physics

Abstract

We apply the principles of quantum mechanics and quantum cosmology to predict probabilities for our local observations of a universe undergoing false vacuum eternal inflation. At a sufficiently fine-grained level, histories of the universe describe a mosaic of bubble universes separated by inflationary regions. We show that predictions for local observations can be obtained directly from sets of much coarser grained histories which only follow a single bubble. These coarse-grained histories contain neither information about our unobservable location nor about the unobservable large-scale structure outside our own bubble. Applied to a landscape of false vacua in the no-boundary state we predict our local universe emerged from the dominant decay channel of the lowest energy false vacuum. We compare and contrast this framework for prediction based on quantum cosmology with traditional approaches to the measure problem in cosmology.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1604.03580,
  title  = {One Bubble to Rule Them All},
  author = {James Hartle and Thomas Hertog},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.03580},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

33 pages, 5 figures, revtex

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:30:51.725Z