Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tom Kibble pioneered the idea that there were one or more symmetry breaking phase transitions in the very early universe, at which defects like monopoles, strings and domain walls would have formed. In the context of grand unified theories, or their extensions, this idea remains compelling: observing these defects would be one of the very few ways of directly confirming the theories. In contrast, inflationary theory invoked a strongly supercooled transition driving a period of exponential expansion which would sweep all such defects away. If inflation terminated slowly, quantum vacuum fluctuations would be amplified and stretched to cosmological scales, forming density variations of just the character required to explain the formation of galaxies. The ensuing paradigm has dominated cosmology for the last three decades. However, basic problems in the scenario remain unresolved. Extreme tuning both of the initial conditions and of the physical laws are required. There are many different versions, each with slightly different predictions. Finally, inflation brought with it the theory of a "multiverse" — a universe containing infinite number of different, infinite, universes — while providing no "measure" or means of calculating the probability of observing any one of them. I will discuss an alternative to inflation, in which the big bang was a bounce from a previous contracting epoch. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC has provided new evidence for such a picture by showing that, within the minimal standard model, our current vacuum is metastable. This opens the door to a cyclic universe scenario in which the electroweak Higgs plays a central role.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".