Speaker
Thomas Hertog
(KULeuven)
Description
Georges Lemaître saw in the quantum birth of the universe also an epistemic horizon, a notion he somewhat poetically expressed in his primeval atom hypothesis. In this he differed from both Einstein and Eddington, and from present-day proponents of the multiverse. I present a novel holographic version of the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal for the origin of the universe and I argue that this is in fact in line with Lemaître’s intuition. This new no-boundary proposal is much like a Primeval Atom 2.0 and I briefly discuss its theoretical, phenomenological and philosophical implications.
