Related papers: A brief history of the multiverse
Inflationary cosmology explains the homogeneity and large-scale structure of the universe through a brief epoch of accelerated expansion following the Big Bang. Cyclic cosmologies, in contrast, describe a universe undergoing successive…
In this review I consider several different issues related to inflation. I will begin with the wave function of the Universe. This issue is pretty old, but recently there were some new insights based on the theory of the self-reproducing…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
At its very beginning, the universe is believed to have grown exponentially in size via the mechanism of inflation. The almost scale-invariant density perturbation spectrum predicted by inflation is strongly supported by cosmological…
A Multiverse can arise from landscapes without de Sitter minima. It can be populated during a period of eternal inflation without trans-Planckian field excursions and without flat potentials. This Multiverse can explain the values of the…
The idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes or universe domains -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our…
We consider a holographic description of the inflationary multiverse, according to which the wave function of the universe is interpreted as the generating functional for a lower dimensional Euclidean theory. We analyze a simple model where…
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 idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our universe appears to be…
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…
The early stages of the universe evolution are discussed according to the hot big bang model and the grand unified theories. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized and their resolution by inflationary cosmology is sketched.…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
I survey physics theories involving parallel universes, which form a natural four-level hierarchy of multiverses allowing progressively greater diversity. Level I: A generic prediction of inflation is an infinite ergodic universe, which…
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
In a unified picture both inflation and present dynamical dark energy arise from the same scalar field. The history of the Universe describes a crossover from a scale invariant "past fixed point" where all particles are massless, to a…
Scientists have measured that what we can see of space is about a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (10^81) times the volume of an average human. Inflationary theory suggests that the entirety of space…
The possibility that the multiverse corresponds to physical reality deserves serious investigation. Having three different important theories,(quantum mechanics, string theory and inflation), predict the existence of the multiverse is…
In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…
An introductory account is given of the inflationary cosmology, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the Universe's earliest stages. The historical motivation is briefly outlined, and the modelling of the inflationary…
The aim of this paper is to show, that the 'oscillating universe' is a viable alternative to inflation. We remind that this model provides a natural solution to the flatness or entropy and to the horizon problem of standard cosmology. We…