Origin of Structure in the Universe: Quantum Cosmology Reconsidered

Based on a more careful canonical analysis, we motivate a reduced quantization - in the sense of superspace quantization - of slightly inhomogeneous cosmology in place of the Dirac quantization in the existing literature, and provide it in the vacuum case. This is attained through consideration of configuration space geometries at various levels of reduction. Some of these have the good fortunate of being flat. Geometrically natural coordinates for these are interpreted in terms of the original redundant formulation's well-known mode expansion coefficients.