Speculative String-Cosmologies as Geodesically Incomplete.

Penrose diagrams of de Sitter space in the flat (left) and static (right) slicings that each cover only part of the whole de Sitter space, and that are both geodesically incomplete.

Alan Guth, Alvin Borde and Alexander Vilenkin have argued that within the framework of a future-eternal inflationary multiverse, as well as some more speculative string-cosmologies, all worldlines are geodesically incomplete and, thus, the multiverse has to have a beginning. Unfortunately, if future-eternal inflation is true, all “hypotheses about the ultimate beginning of the universe would become totally divorced from any observable consequences. Since our own pocket universe would be equally likely to lie anywhere on the infinite tree of universes produced by eternal inflation, we would expect to find ourselves arbitrarily far from the beginning. The infinite inflating network would presumably approach some kind of steady state, losing all memory of how it started […] Thus, there would be no way of relating the properties of the ultimate origin to anything that we might observe in today’s universe.” (Guth).

On the other hand, Andrei Linde has argued that the multiverse could be past-eternal, because either all single world lines might have to start somewhere, but not the whole bundle of them (Linde), or there could even exist some (albeit strange) space-times with single past-eternal world lines.

This issue is not settled, and even in those scenarios a global arrow of time may not necessarily exist. However, there are other frameworks possible – and they have even already been developed to some extent, where a future-eternal inflationary multiverse is both not past-eternal and beginningless but arise from some primordial vacuum which is macroscopically time-less. Thus, again, the beginning of some classical space-times is not equivalent with the beginning of everything.

We can even imagine that there is no multiverse, but that the whole (perhaps finite) universe – our universe – once was in a steady state without any macroscopic arrows of time but, due to a statistical fluctuation above a certain threshold value, started to expand  – or to contract, bounce and expand – as a whole and acquired an arrow of time. In such a case the above-mentioned reply, which was based on the spatial distinction of a beginning of some parts of the world and the eternity of the world as a whole, would collapse.

Nevertheless it is necessary to distinguish between the different notions and extensions of the term “universe”. In the simplest case, Kant’s antinomy might be based on an ambiguity of the term “world” (i.e. the difference between “universe” and “multiverse”), but it does not need to; and it was not assumed here that it necessarily does. The temporal part of Kant’s first antinomy was purely about the question whether the macroscopic arrow of time is past-eternal or not. And if it is not past-eternal this does not mean that time and hence the world has an absolute beginning in every respect – it is still possible that there was or is a world with some underlying microscopic time. (By the way, one can also imagine that, even if our arrow of time is past- and/or future-eternal, there might exist “timeless islands” someday: for instance isolated black holes if they would not ultimately radiate away due to quantum effects, or empty static universes if they could split off of our space-time.)

Of course it is possible that firstly a natural principle of plentitude is realized and different multiverses (sets of universes) exist totally independent from each other, and secondly that some of them are truly past-eternal while others have an absolute beginning and others have only local starting points of local arrows of time as it was suggested here. If so, we might not be able to tell in what kind we live in. And this would be irrelevant in the end, because then every possible world is actual and probably exists infinitely often. But we do not know whether such an extreme principle of plentitude does apply or if cosmology is ultimately just and only a matter of pure logical consistency, allowing us finally to calculate the complete architecture of the world by armchair-reasoning.

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Empty Geometry : Absolute Nothingness

For the Russian cosmologist, Alex Vilenkin, the multiple universes are separated and disconnected from one another. Each arises out of nothing by a process called quantum tunneling, spontaneously crossing the boundary between existence and non-existence with no expenditure of energy. Universes spring into action with precisely zero total energy, the positive energy of matter being opposite and equal to the negative energy of gravitation. Mass comes free, because energy is zero.

As Alan Guth says,

Putting [general relativity and quantum mechanics] together, one can imagine that the universe started in the total empty geometry – absolute nothingness – and then made a quantum tunneling transition to a nonempty state. Calculations show that a universe created this way would typically be subatomic in size, but that is no problem . . . Vilenkin was able to invoke inflation to enlarge the universe to its current size.

and Vilenkin explains,

[T]he state of “nothing” cannot be identified with absolute nothingness. The tunneling is described by the laws of quantum mechanics, and thus “nothing” should be subject to these laws. The laws of physics must have existed, even though there was no universe.

Classical theory dictates that the system can break apart only when it is excited with energy beyond the barrier height. In quantum theory there is a certain probability to tunnel out under the barrier.