相关论文: Black holes and up-tunneling suppress Boltzmann br…

To make predictions for an eternally inflating "multiverse", one must adopt a procedure for regulating its divergent spacetime volume. Recently, a new test of such spacetime measures has emerged: normal observers - who evolve in pocket…

Understanding the observed arrow of time is equivalent, under general assumptions, to explaining why Boltzmann brains do not overwhelm ordinary observers. It is usually thought that this provides a condition on the decay rate of every…

"Boltzmann brains" are human brains that arise as thermal or quantum fluctuations and last at least long enough to think a few thoughts. In many scenarios involving universes of infinite size or duration, Boltzmann brains are infinitely…

Vacuum bubbles may nucleate and expand during the inflationary epoch in the early universe. After inflation ends, the bubbles quickly dissipate their kinetic energy; they come to rest with respect to the Hubble flow and eventually form…

We consider the effect of inhomogeneities on the rate of false vacuum decay. Modelling the inhomogeneity by a black hole, we construct explicit Euclidean instantons which describe the nucleation of a bubble of true vacuum centred on 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…

Many cosmologists (myself included) have advocated volume weighting for the cosmological measure problem, weighting spatial hypersurfaces by their volume. However, this often leads to the Boltzmann brain problem, that almost all…

Linde in hep-th/0611043 shows that some (though not all) versions of the global (volume-weighted) description avoid the "Boltzmann brain" problem raised in hep-th/0610079 if the universe does not have a decay time less than 20 Gyr. Here I…

A ``bubble universe'' nucleating in an eternally inflating false vacuum will experience, in the course of its expansion, collisions with an infinite number of other bubbles. In an idealized model, we calculate the rate of collisions around…

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…

There are reasons (which we enumerate) to think that an infinite extra dimension will harbor a black hole. In this case, brane-localized modes of gravity and gauge fields become quasilocalized, and light from a distant object can become…

Using the result obtained in a prevoius paper, in which I found an upper limit on the region of particle creation in the vicinity of the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole, and by assuming that all the created energy will be…

General relativity predicts that the inner horizon of an astronomically realistic rotating black hole is subject to the mass inflation instability. The inflationary instability acts like a gravity-powered particle accelerator of…

The tunneling approach for entropy generation in quantum gravity is applied to black holes. The area entropy is recovered and shown to count only a tiny fraction of the black hole degeneracy. The latter stems from the extension of the wave…

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"…

Eternal inflation is a seemingly generic consequence of theories that give rise to accelerated expansion of the universe and possess multiple vacuum states. Making predictions in an eternally inflating universe is notoriously difficult…

We analyse vacuum decay in rotating BTZ black hole spacetimes with the thin wall approximation. Possible parameter regions for the vacuum decay are clarified. We find that the nucleation rate is dominated by the bounce solution with the…

Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Gigayears, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers…

In theories with a broken discrete symmetry, Hubble sized spherical domain walls may spontaneously nucleate during inflation. These objects are subsequently stretched by the inflationary expansion, resulting in a broad distribution of…

Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the…