Did the universe have a beginning?
Audrey Mithani, Alexander Vilenkin
(Submitted on 20 Apr 2012)
Mere illustration/Mera ilustração
We discuss three candidate scenarios which seem to allow the possibility that the universe could have existed forever with no initial singularity: eternal infation, cyclic evolution, and the emergent universe. The first two of these scenarios are geodesically incomplete to the past, and thus cannot describe a universe without a beginning. The third, although it is stable with respect to classical perturbations, can collapse quantum mechanically, and therefore cannot have an eternal past.
Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the Proceedings of the 10th Incternational Conference on Gravitation, Astrophysics and Cosmology, Quy-Nhon, Vietnam, December 2011
Subjects: High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
Cite as: arXiv:1204.4658v1 [hep-th]
Submission historyFrom: Audrey Mithani [view email]
[v1] Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:51:42 GMT (182kb,D)
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