Scientific Colloquium
March 28, 2008


"The Inflationary Multiverse"

An early epoch of extremely rapid expansion, 'inflation', is widely accepted as a key component of our standard cosmological model, and has made nontrivial and observationally-confirmed predictions.  But it has a peculiar and profound side effect: in generic inflation models, the inflationary epoch creates not just one region comparable to our observable universe, but also infinitely many more such regions, leading to a vast, complex spacetime often called the 'inflationary multiverse'.  To make matters even more interesting, contemporary work in string theory strongly suggest that at sub-string energy scales, string theory leads to a complex 'effective theory' that would both drive eternal inflation, but also give different (low energy effective) physics and cosmological properties to different regions; this would give great diversity to the multiverse.  In this talk I will give an overview of these developments, focusing on giving a picture of the structure of the multiverse, and addressing the issue of how tests or predictions of multiverse models might be made.


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