The Origin of Our Universe

False vacuum decay with gravity. The standard mechanism for bubble nucleation.

The universe quantum-tunneled from literal nothing, no space, no time, no fields.

Once inflation starts, it never stops everywhere, generating a self-reproducing multiverse.

Dark energy as a slowly rolling scalar field, with an equation of state above -1 that changes over time, not a fixed cosmological constant.

Universes evolve by natural selection. Black holes are reproductive events, and our universe is descended from ancestors that were good at making black holes.

Flat geometry, cold dark matter, a cosmological constant Λ for dark energy. Fits cosmology with six numbers.

Quantum geometry prevents the singularity. Our Bang is the bounce of a contracting predecessor.

A four-dimensional star collapsed in a five-dimensional bulk, throwing off a three-dimensional membrane that became our expanding universe.

The universe has no temporal boundary, time itself emerged from a smooth Euclidean cap.

String theory predicts a dilaton-driven contracting phase before the Bang.

Two parallel branes collide periodically, each collision is a Big Bang.

Apply Loop Quantum Gravity to cosmology and the Big Bang singularity disappears, replaced by a quantum bounce between two phases of the universe.

The heat death of one aeon is the Big Bang of the next, via conformal rescaling.

Spacetime can twist as well as bend if matter has intrinsic spin. At ultra-high density the twist becomes a repulsive force that stops gravitational collapse and bounces the collapsing matter into a new expanding universe inside the parent black hole.

The universe has a mirror image on the other side of the Big Bang.

Our universe may be a baby universe formed inside a primordial black hole during a delayed first-order phase transition.