Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2016
“Eternal” Inflation has relevelled the creation of universes, making it a “routine” physical occurence. The mechanism of the Big Bang, from the conditions triggering it, to the eventual creation of the entire matter content of the resulting universe, involves no singular physical processes. However, causal horizons, due to General Relativity, separate the newborn universe from the parent universe in which it was seeded as a localized vacuum energy. The new universe's expansion only occurs “after” infinite time, i.e. “never”, in the parents frame. This forces a reassessment of “reality”. The two universes are connected by the world line of the initial localized vacuum energy, originating in the parent universe. Assuming that the parent universe itself was generated in a similar fashion, etc., an infinite sequence of previous universes is thus connected by one world-line, like a string of beads.