Session 6
Cosmology
Chair: Stephen Shenker, Stanford, USA
Rapporteur: Joseph Polchinski, UCSB, USA
Scientific secretaries: Christiane Schomblond (Universit4 Libre de Bruxelles) and
Peter Tinyakow (Universitk Libre de Bruxelles)S. Shenker As I was writing up the program of the cosmology session of today,
I had one of these epiphanies that are such a nice part of our subject. I realized
in describing the structure of our little session that phenomena which are familiar
from biology seem to be taking place: there is this remarkable phenomenon called
“ontology recapitulates phylogeny” where the structure of the embryo when it is
growing seems to reproduce the entire history of the species that is developing. And
here in our little session we see the whole history of the Universe being recreated.
We are likely to start with a Big Bang. Then there will be a rapid period of high
temperature in our discussion, probably optically opaque. I do not know what this
coffee break is, maybe you can help me with that. Then we return to a prolonged
period of inflation which will exit into a period of reheating, again probably optically
opaque, and then we will basically return to the period of structure formation. Now,
any good analysis like this, you test by trying to apply it outside the domain of its
validity. And although it is not written on this schedule, after this discussion whattakes place is that David Gross will give some closing remarks. So I tried to place
Davis Gross’ presentation in this framework and it could be that this presentation
will be a Big Crunch. But thinking more carefully, it seems more likely that it will
be one of those phases in the evolution of the Universe that seems to go on almost
forever.
Laughter.
Alright, I have had my fun. I turn things over to Polchinski.215