We discuss three candidate scenarios which seem to allow the possibility that the universe could have existed forever with no initial singularity: eternal inflation, 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.
CITATION STYLE
Mithani, A., & Vilenkin, A. (2011). Did the universe have a beginning? In Proceedings of the 10th International conference on Gravitation, Astrophysics and Cosmology, ICGAC 2011 (pp. 173–177). The Gioi Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57040-2_22
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