Tufts/CfA/MIT Cosmology Seminar, at MIT:

Tuesday, October 2, 2001
2:30 pm
Center for Theoretical Physics Seminar Room
Refreshments at 2:00, same location

"Inflation is Not Past-Eternal"


Alan Guth
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract:

Many inflating spacetimes are likely to violate the weak energy condition, a key assumption of singularity theorems. In this talk I will describe work with Borde and Vilenkin in which we developed a simple kinematical argument, without assuming any energy condition, that a cosmological model that is inflating -- or just expanding sufficiently fast -- must be incomplete in null and timelike past directions. Specifically, we obtained a bound on the integral of the Hubble parameter over a past-directed timelike or null geodesic. Thus inflationary models require some physics other than inflation -- for example, a mechanism of quantum creation -- to describe the past boundary of the inflating region of spacetime.

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