The great emptiness at the beginning of the Universe

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept that the Universe may have originated from a lightlike vacuum state in the infinite past, suggesting an eternal, non-singular beginning without a traditional big bang.

Contribution

It proposes a model where the early Universe is characterized by a lightlike vacuum, challenging the necessity of a big bang singularity.

Findings

The early Universe can be described as a lightlike vacuum with scale invariance.

The primordial flat frame reveals a flat Minkowski space at the Universe's beginning.

The Universe could have evolved eternally from this vacuum state.

Abstract

The great emptiness is a possible beginning of the Universe in the infinite past of physical time. For the epoch of great emptiness particles are extremely rare and effectively massless. Only expectation values of fields and average fluctuations characterize the lightlike vacuum of this empty Universe. The physical content of the early stages of standard inflationary cosmological models is the lightlike vacuum. Towards the beginning, the Universe is almost scale invariant. This is best seen by an appropriate choice of the metric field -- the primordial flat frame -- for which the beginning of a homogeneous metric is flat Minkowski space. We suggest that our observed inhomogeneous Universe can evolve from the lightlike vacuum in the infinite past, and therefore can have lasted eternally. Then no physical big bang singularity is present.