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Description
We live in a golden age for learning about the universe and the quantum laws which govern it. Our most powerful telescopes show the cosmos to be surprisingly simple on the largest scales. Likewise, our most powerful “microscope”, the Large Hadron Collider, finds no deviations from known physics on the smallest scales probed. The unexpected simplicity suggests that the known physical laws might hold right back to the big bang. If so, cosmic observations provide us with a direct view of our own quantum origins. I’ll outline a new, minimal approach to unifying the known physical laws with cosmology based on the hypothesis that the universe respects the most basic known symmetry of matter, space and time, known as CPT symmetry, so that the Big Bang is, in effect, a mirror at the beginning of time. This picture neatly accounts for the dark matter and the observed synchronous pattern in the cosmic microwave background. Using Hawking’s powerful insights, we explain thermodynamically why the universe is so large, smooth and symmetrical without requiring inflation, extra dimensions or a multiverse. Black hole horizons are likewise explained as CPT mirrors. The long-wavelength primordial fluctuations in cosmology are re-interpreted as vacuum fluctuations in dimension zero scalars. These four-derivative fields can cancel the stress energy divergences in the Standard Model at leading order, without supersymmetry or strings. A new no-ghost theorem shows that such fields can be perfectly causal and unitary. They provide a new anomaly cancellation mechanism explaining why there are three generations of elementary particles. Motivated by the simplicity and order we observe in the universe, we are attempting to build a simpler and more predictive understanding of nature's most basic physical laws.
