4.6 Article Proceedings Paper

Eternal inflation and its implications

Journal

JOURNAL OF PHYSICS A-MATHEMATICAL AND THEORETICAL
Volume 40, Issue 25, Pages 6811-6826

Publisher

IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1751-8113/40/25/S25

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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 eternal inflation are unobservable, it is argued that eternal inflation has real consequences in terms of the way that predictions are extracted from theoretical models. The ambiguities in defining probabilities in eternally inflating spacetimes are reviewed, with emphasis on the youngness paradox that results from a synchronous gauge regularization technique. Although inflation is generically eternal into the future, it is not eternal into the past: it can be proven under reasonable assumptions that the inflating region must be incomplete in past directions, so some physics other than inflation is needed to describe the past boundary of the inflating region.

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