The Initial State of the Universe

 

Prof Hoi-Lai Yu
Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica
 

24 Nov 2016 (Thursday)
2:00 pm
IAS4042, 4/F, Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST

FRW cosmology which is homogenous and isotropic is in acute conflicts with the attractive nature of gravitation which lumps things together described by General Relativity (GR). The great successes of FRW with experiments quest for paradigm shift in GR. The conformal structures, characterized by the Weyl tensor, are missing from GR. Matter is not really able to tell space-time how to curve. The intrinsic time formalism of gravitation not only generates the same physical contents of GR but also allows the potential being modified to include the conformally invariant Cotton-York (CY) tensor. The CY tensor along with the extrinsic curvature provides a full description of the gravitational depth of field in the theory, and as a result, no scalar field inflaton is needed to provide the initial exponential spatial expansion.