Some notes on the Big Trip

The big trip is a cosmological process thought to occur in the future by which the entire universe would be engulfed inside a gigantic wormhole and might travel through it along space and time. In this paper we discuss different arguments that have been raised against the viability of that process, reaching the conclusions that the process can actually occur by accretion of phantom energy onto the wormholes and that it is stable and might occur in the global context of a multiverse model. We finally argue that the big trip does not contradict any holographic bounds on entropy and information.Comment: 8 pages, no figures, LaTe

Dark energy without dark energy

It is proposed that the current acceleration of the universe is not originated by the existence of a mysterious dark energy fluid nor by the action of extra terms in the gravity Lagrangian, but just from the sub-quantum potential associated with the CMB particles. The resulting cosmic scenario corresponds to a benigner phantom model which is free from the main problems of the current phantom approaches.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, to appear in AIP proceedings of "Dark side of the Universe

Perdurance of multiply connected de Sitter space

This paper deals with a study of the effects that spherically symmetric first-order metric perturbations and vacuum quantum fluctuations have on the stability of the multiply connected de Sitter spacetime recently proposed by Gott and Li. It is the main conclusion of this study that although such a spacetime is stable to the classical metric perturbations for any size of the nonchronal region, it is only stable against the quantum fluctuations of vacuum if the size of the multiply connected region is of the order the Planck scale. Therefore, boundary conditions for the state of the universe based on the notion that the universe created itself in a regime where closed timelike curves were operative and stable, still appear to be physically and philosophically so well supported as are those boundary conditions relying on the notion that the universe was created out of nothing.Comment: 13 pages, RevTe