Lecture 22: The Planck Time---The Present Limit to All Knowledge Astronomy 5: The Formation and Evolution of the Universe Sandra M. Faber Spring Quarter 2007 UC Santa Cruz
Cosmic history in 4 easy steps Big Bang Zoom Graphics from WMAP team
Two giants of modern cosmology AF-751 (left, Alan Guth), AF-772 (right, Andrei Linde) Alan Guth: Inflation Andre Linde: Eternal Inflation
Eternal inflation posits inflating universes budding out of inflating universes AF-488. Credit: A. Linde. (Also shown in The Cosmos, Fig. 19-29, but they don’t own the copyright).
The landscape of eternal inflation: graphs show energy density in “inflaton” field AF-489. Credit: A. Linde.
Eternal inflation at higher resolution The laws of physics may be different in each colored domain Our Universe is one of the valleys that is not inflating.
Calabi-Yau spaces: Attempts to “draw” the 11-dimensional space of string theory in three dimensions