2012/04/20 by Audrey T. Mithani, Audrey Mithani, Mithani, Audrey +2 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1204.4658
6 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the Proceedings of the 10th Incternational Conference on Gravitation, Astrophysics and Cosmology, Quy-Nhon, Vietnam, December 2011
arxiv created 2012/04/20 · openalex publication_date 2012/04/20 · arxiv published 2012/04/20 · arxiv updated 2012/04/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.