Related papers: Odds of observing the multiverse
It is already understood that the increasing observational evidence for an open Universe may be reconciled with inflation if our horizon is contained inside one single huge bubble nucleated during the inflationary phase transition. In the…
We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit…
Inflationary cosmology leads to the picture of a "multiverse," involving an infinite number of (spatially infinite) post-inflationary thermalized regions, called pocket universes. In the context of theories with many vacua, such as the…
We are on the verge of the first precision testing of the inflationary cosmology as a model for the origin of structure in the Universe. I review the key predictions of inflation which can be used as observational tests, in the sense of…
Our universe may be contained in one among a diverging number of bubbles that nucleate within an eternally inflating multiverse. A promising measure to regulate the diverging spacetime volume of such a multiverse is the scale-factor cutoff,…
An unresolved question in inflationary cosmology is the assignment of probabilities to different types of events that can occur in the eternally inflating multiverse. We explore the possibility that the resolution of this "measure problem"…
Many theories of the early universe predict the existence of a multiverse where bubbles continuously nucleate giving rise to observers in their interior. In this paper, we point out that topological defects of several dimensionalities will…
The theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of…
Our universe may have formed via bubble nucleation in an eternally-inflating background. Furthermore, the background may have a compact dimension--the modulus of which tunnels out of a metastable minimum during bubble nucleation--which…
In a universe dominated by a small cosmological constant or by eternal dark energy with equation of state w < -1/3, observers are surrounded by event horizons. The horizons limit how much of the universe the observers can ever access. We…
In this paper we explore the relationship between the existence of eternal inflation and the initial conditions leading to inflation. We demonstrate that past and future completion of inflation is related, in that past-incomplete inflation…
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…
Eternal inflation arising from a potential landscape predicts that our universe is one realization of many possible cosmological histories. One way to access different cosmological histories is via the nucleation of bubble universes from a…
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…
I briefly review the physics of cosmic bubble collisions in false-vacuum eternal inflation. My purpose is to provide an introduction to the subject for readers unfamiliar with it, focussing on recent work related to the prospects for…
We investigate the holographic quantum entanglement of a visible universe in an inflationary cosmology. To do so, we consider an AdS space with a dS boundary which represents an expanding space in time. In an inflationary cosmology, there…
We consider an alternative scenario of inflation which can account for a spatially open universe. It is similar to the old inflation in which the bubble nucleation occurs in the sea of false vacuum, but differs from it in that the second…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…
A new model of the observed universe, using solutions to the full Einstein equations, is developed from the hypothesis that our observable universe is an underdense bubble, with an internally inhomogeneous fractal bubble distribution of…
In this work we study the imprints of bubble nucleation on primordial inflationary perturbations. We assume that the bubble is formed via the tunneling of a spectator field from the false vacuum of its potential to its true vacuum. We…