- April 11, 2018, 4:00 pm US/Central
- Christof Wetterich
- Pushpa Bhat
- Video
Observation of the redshift of distant galaxies tells us that the ratio between intergalactic distances and the size of atoms increases. An expanding Universe or shrinking atoms both reflect the same reality and are equivalent. In a new view on cosmology with steadily increasing masses of elementary particles the universe can exist forever in the past and future – the big bang singularity turns out to be an artifact of an inappropriate choice of fields. Quantum gravity computations indicate that the universe could start in the infinite past near an ultraviolet fixed point with massless particles, and approach in the infinite future an infrared fixed point with spontaneously broken scale symmetry and massive particles. The cosmological constant problem is solved. The resulting model describes early inflationary cosmology and late dynamical dark energy with the same scalar field. It can be tested by observation of huge lumps in the cosmic neutrino background.