The Census taker's hat
Oct, 2007Citations per year
Abstract: (arXiv)
If the observable universe really is a hologram, then of what sort? Is it rich enough to keep track of an eternally inflating multiverse? What physical and mathematical principles underlie it? Is the hologram a lower dimensional quantum field theory, and if so, how many dimensions are explicit, and how many 'emerge?' Does the Holographic description provide clues for defining a probability measure on the Landscape? The purpose of this lecture is first, to briefly review a proposal for a holographic cosmology by Freivogel, Sekino, Susskind, and Yeh (FSSY), and then to develop a physical interpretation in terms of a 'Cosmic Census Taker:' an idea introduced in reference [1]. The mathematical structure--a hybrid of the Wheeler DeWitt formalism and holography--is a boundary 'Liouville' field theory, whose UV/IR duality is closely related to the time evolution of the Census Taker's observations. That time evolution is represented by the renormalization-group flow of the Liouville theory. Although quite general, the Census Taker idea was originally introduced in \cite{shenker}, for the purpose of counting bubbles that collide with the Census Taker's bubble. The 'Persistence of Memory' phenomenon discovered by Garriga, Guth, and Vilenkin, has a natural RG interpretation, as does slow roll inflation. The RG flow and the related C-theorem are closely connected with generalized entropy bounds.- lectures: 2007/09/24
- cosmological model
- minisuperspace
- space-time: Robertson-Walker
- Friedman model
- holography
- Wheeler-DeWitt equation
- Hamiltonian formalism
- field theory: scalar
- fluctuation
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