Related papers: Future Foam
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…
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…
In the picture of eternal inflation as driven by a scalar potential with multiple minima, our observable universe resides inside one of many bubbles formed from transitions out of a false vacuum. These bubbles necessarily collide, upsetting…
Eternal inflation predicts our observable universe lies within a bubble (or pocket universe) embedded in a volume of inflating space. The interior of the bubble undergoes inflation and standard cosmology, while the bubble walls expand…
We consider the no-boundary proposal for homogeneous isotropic closed universes with a cosmological constant and a scalar field with a quadratic potential. In the semi-classical limit, it predicts classical behavior at late times if the…
It has recently been shown that in single field slow-roll inflation the total volume cannot grow by a factor larger than e^(S_dS/2) without becoming infinite. The bound is saturated exactly at the phase transition to eternal inflation where…
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…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. It is argued that essentially all inflationary models lead to (future-)eternal…
This is the third paper in a series establishing a quantitative relation between inflationary scalar field potential landscapes and the relic perturbations left by the collision between bubbles produced during eternal inflation. We…
A generic spacetime topology contains timelike boundaries. Making use of two such boundaries, we formulate a microscopic holographic dual that captures cosmological spacetime beyond the cosmic horizon patch, including the future wedge. We…
The no-boundary wave function (NBWF) specifies a measure for prediction in cosmology that selects inflationary histories and remains well behaved for spatially large or infinite universes. This paper explores the predictions of the NBWF for…
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…
Recently it has been suggested that non-gaussian inflationary perturbations can be usefully analysed in terms of a putative dual gauge theory defined on the future conformal infinity generated by an accelerating cosmology. The problem is…
We investigate the global structure of inflationary universe both by analytical methods and by computer simulations of stochastic processes in the early Universe. We show that the global structure of the universe depends crucially on the…
This paper is the third in a series investigating the possibility that if we reside in an inflationary "bubble universe", we might observe the effects of collisions with other such bubbles. Here, we study the interior structure of a bubble…
Models of eternal inflation predict a stochastic self-similar geometry of the universe at very large scales and allow existence of points that never thermalize. I explore the fractal geometry of the resulting spacetime, using…
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…
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…
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…
Observing the relics of collisions between bubble universes would provide direct evidence for the existence of an eternally inflating Multiverse; the non-observation of such events can also provide important constraints on inflationary…