🚀 go-pugleaf

tolman%asylum.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Kenneth Tolman) writes:
> 
>   I am looking for actual specific references to the idea that the start
> of the universe may have been a quantum fluctuation.  I seem to recall
> Hawking making some such statement. 
>   Or then again, maybe it was something I read on a fortune cookie....
> Any comments or sources I could seek out?
> 
> Thanks a fifteen billion,
> 
> 

	Actually, quantum cosmogony predates Hawking by a bit.
	The seminal idea that the Universe may be a vacuum
	fluctuation is due to Ed Tryon (Nature 246, 396 (1973)).
	The idea of quantum tunneling of the universe as a whole
	is due to Heinz Pagels and me (D. Atkatz and H. Pagels
	Phys. Rev. D 25, 2065 (1982)), and was extended and
	developed in terms of the "tunneling wavefunction," by
	Alex Vilenkin (A. Vilenkin Phys. Rev. D 30, 509 (1984)).
	Brout, Englert, and Gunzig introduced a quite different
	quantum creation model in 1978 (Ann. Phys. (NY) 115,
	78 (1978)).

	You might want to look at "Introductory Lectures on
	Quantum Cosmology," by J.J. Halliwell, in "Quantum
	Cosmology and Baby Universes" (World Scientific, 1991).
	It has a wonderful bibliography (in addition to its
	being an excellent introduction.

	-David