Related papers: Many worlds in one
Recently Hollands and Wald argued that inflation does not solve any of the major cosmological problems. We explain why we disagree with their arguments. They also proposed a new speculative mechanism of generation of density perturbations.…
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 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…
Some of the parameters we call ``constants of Nature'' may in fact be variables related to the local values of some dynamical fields. During inflation, these variables are randomized by quantum fluctuations. In cases when the variable in…
The discovery of accelerating expansion of the universe has led us to take the dramatic view that our universe may be one of the many universes in which low energy physical laws take different forms: the multiverse. I explain why/how this…
We consider an inflationary universe scenario with multiple stages of inflation. The primary inflation, which may start at the Planck epoch, is followed by secondary inflations, which include the cosmological inflation that causes the…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
During the inflationary phase of the early universe, quantum fluctuations in the vacuum generate particles as they stretch beyond the Hubble length. These fluctuations are thought to result in the density fluctuations and gravitational…
We investigate uniform rate inflationary universe in the framework of loop quantum cosmology (LQC) and find that this seemingly simple inflationary model is interlinked with various concepts such as cyclic evolution, HNI inflation and…
Valid ideas that physical reality is vastly larger than human perception of it, and that the perceived part may not be representative of the whole, exist on many levels and have a long history. After a brief general inventory of those ideas…
We propose a cosmological lingering phase for the initial state prior to inflation which would help address the singularity problem of inflation. The universe begins with a constant (Hagedorn) temperature and then transitions into an…
We show that, contrary to the standard belief, primordial monopoles expand exponentially during inflation in the new inflationary universe scenario. Moreover, inflation of monopoles continues without an end even when inflation ends in the…
I study a model which describes the birth of the universe using a global topological phase transition with a complex manifold where the time, $\tau$, is considered as a complex variable. Before the big bang $\tau$ is a purely imaginary…
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 review here some recent results that show that inflationary cosmological models must contain initial singularities. We also present a new singularity theorem. The question of the initial singularity re-emerges in inflationary cosmology…
The decoherence of quantum fluctuations into classical perturbations during inflation is discussed. A simple quantum mechanical argument, using a spatial particle wavefunction rather than a field description, shows that observable…
(Abridged) Does inflation have to happen all in one go? The answer is a resounding no! All cosmological problems can be solved by a sequence of short bursts of cosmic acceleration, interrupted by short epochs of decelerated expansion. The…
In order to draw out the essential behavior of the universe, investigations of early universe cosmology often reduce the complex system to a simple integrable system. Inflationary models are of this kind as they focus on simple scalar field…
Using computer simulations we study the geometry of a typical quantum universe, i.e. the geometry one might expect before a possible period of inflation. We display it using coordinates defined by means of four classical scalar fields…
We consider vacuum quantum effects in the Early Universe, which may lead to inflation. The inflation is a direct consequence of the supposition that, at high energies, all the particles can be described by the weakly interacting, massless,…