MONOPOLES AS BIG AS A UNIVERSE AND THE UNIVERSE INSIDE A BUBBLE

Abstract

One of the most beautiful concepts in theoretical physics was the idea of fridmons, the semi-closed worlds which from the outside look like an elementary particle, but which may contain the whole universe in their heart. This idea was developed 25 years ago by Markov and his collaborators [1]. In this paper I will discuss some related ideas which have been developed very recently in the context of inflationary cosmology. The first one is the possibility that magnetic monopoles and other topological defects in a certain class of theories inflate, become exponentially large, and unceasingly produce other inflationary monopoles. The second idea is the possibility that an infinitely large open inflationary universe may fit into an interior of a single bubble of a finite size produced during the false vacuum decay.