Vilenkin, Alexander

Alex is Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. A theoretical physicist, he focuses on the quantum creation (“tunneling”) of the universe from nothing and its eternal inflation. He is the author of Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes. What is the difference between Alex Vilenkin\'s tunneling out of \'nothingness\' and Steven Hawking\'s idea? In Hawking model, as exotic as it sounds, you still start with a state that could be defined by four space-like dimensions in the state \'prior\' to the Big Bang. Hawking envisions that a quantum fluctuation caused the four space dimensions to change so that one of the four \'became\' time-like, and this started the flow of classical time as we know it. Before this change, there was only a timeless state of \'Now\'. In Alex’s model, the initial state didn\'t even have that much content. It was pure nothingness without dimension, space, time, field, energy, color, or content!