Cosmology from the vacuum
  We argue that standard tools of holography can be used to describe fully
non-perturbative microscopic models of cosmology in which a period of
accelerated expansion may result from the positive potential energy of
time-dependent scalar fields evolving towards a region with negative potential.
In these models, the fundamental cosmological constant is negative, and the
universe eventually recollapses in a time-reversal symmetric way. The
microscopic description naturally selects a special state for the cosmology. In
this framework, physics in the cosmological spacetime is dual to the vacuum
physics in a static planar asymptotically AdS Lorentzian wormhole spacetime, in
the sense that the background spacetimes and observables are related by
analytic continuation. The dual spacetime is weakly curved everywhere, so any
cosmological observables can be computed in the dual picture via effective
field theory without detailed knowledge of the UV completion or the physics
near the big bang. In particular, while inflation may explain the origin of
perturbations in the cosmology picture, the perturbations can be deduced from
the dual picture without any knowledge of the inflationary potential.
