Related papers: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
I summarize the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are…
Since the advent of inflation, several theorems have been proven suggesting that although inflation can (and generically does) continue eternally into the future, it cannot be extended eternally into the past to create a ``steady-state''…
Eternal inflation produces pocket universes with all physically allowed vacua and histories. Some of these pocket universes might contain a phase of slow-roll inflation, some might undergo cycles of cosmological evolution and some might…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. I describe the quantum origin of density perturbations, giving a heuristic derivation of…
We develop our recent suggestion that inflation may be made past eternal, so that there is no initial cosmological singularity or "beginning of time". Inflation with multiple vacua generically approaches a steady-state statistical…
The definition of probabilities in eternally inflating universes requires a measure to regulate the infinite spacetime volume, and much of the current literature uses a global time cutoff for this purpose. Such measures have been found to…
Eternal inflation is a seemingly generic consequence of theories that give rise to accelerated expansion of the universe and possess multiple vacuum states. Making predictions in an eternally inflating universe is notoriously difficult…
In this paper we assume the de Sitter Space version of Black Hole Complementarity which states that a single causal patch of de Sitter space is described as an isolated finite temperature cavity bounded by a horizon which allows no loss of…
Motivated by the lessons of black hole complementarity, we develop a causal patch description of eternal inflation. We argue that an observer cannot ascribe a semiclassical geometry to regions outside his horizon, because the large-scale…
In this paper we introduce a simple discrete stochastic model of eternal inflation that shares many of the most important features of the continuum theory as it is now understood. The model allows us to construct a multiverse and rigorously…
We present an interpretation of the physics of space-times undergoing eternal inflation by repeated nucleation of bubbles. In many cases the physics can be interpreted in terms of the quantum mechanics of a system with a finite number of…
We show that eternal inflation is compatible with holography. In particular, we emphasize that if a region is asymptotically de Sitter in the future, holographic arguments by themselves place no bound on the number of past e-foldings. We…
In generic models of cosmological inflation, quantum fluctuations strongly influence the spacetime metric and produce infinitely many regions where the end of inflation (reheating) is delayed until arbitrarily late times. The geometry of…
A ``bubble universe'' nucleating in an eternally inflating false vacuum will experience, in the course of its expansion, collisions with an infinite number of other bubbles. In an idealized model, we calculate the rate of collisions around…
Global-local duality is the equivalence of seemingly different regulators in eternal inflation. For example, the light-cone time cutoff (a global measure, which regulates time) makes the same predictions as the causal patch (a local measure…
We provide a very general argument showing that the Universe must have kept its quantum memories from an epoch much earlier than $60$ e-foldings before the end of inflation. The point is that a generic system of enhanced memory storage…
In a situation like eternal inflation, where our data is replicated at infinitely-many other space-time events, it is necessary to make a prior assumption about our location to extract predictions. The principle of mediocrity entails that…
We show that in any model of non-eternal inflation satisfying the null energy condition, the area of the de Sitter horizon increases by at least one Planck unit in each inflationary e-folding. This observation gives an operational meaning…