Related papers: Time Since the Beginning
This article gives a brief qualitative description of the possible evolution of the early Universe between the end of an inflationary epoch and the end of Big Bang nucleosynthesis. After a general introduction, establishing the minimum…
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.…
Discovered almost forty years ago, inflation has become the leading paradigm for the early universe. Originally invented to avoid the fine-tuning puzzles of the standard model of cosmology, the so-called hot Big Bang phase, inflation has…
Inflation is known to be generically eternal to the future: the false vacuum is thermalized in some regions of space, while inflation continues in other regions. Here, we address the question of whether inflation can also be eternal to the…
The early universe according to the big bang and the grand unified theories is discussed. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
We argue that the emergent spacetime picture admits a background-independent formulation of cosmic inflation. The inflation in this picture corresponds to the dynamical emergence of spacetime while the conventional inflation is simply an…
The fundamental paradox of the incompatibility of the observed large-scale uniformity of the Universe with the fact that the age of the Universe is finite is overcome by the introduction of an initial a period of superluminal expansion of…
The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent…
The standard big bang cosmological model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions are summarized. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
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…
In a previous paper we proposed a new approach to the beginning of inflation -- a lingering universe. The universe begins in a lingering state with a nearly vanishing Hubble parameter. This calls into question the absolute age of the…
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.…
Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…
The evolution of the universe started from a hot and dense Big Bang point. Temperature fluctuation map of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation and initial seeds of large scale structures (LSS) are explained by an inflationary period…
One of the fundamental problems of modern cosmology is to explain the origin of all the matter and radiation in the Universe today. The inflationary model predicts that the oscillations of the scalar field at the end of inflation will…
We consider a novel model of cosmic inflation. In our model one does not need any specific matter field to drive inflation, but inflation stems from the microscopic, Planck scale structure of spacetime, thus being of quantum gravitational…
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…
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…