Publisher's Synopsis
In this book, I discuss the long-standing technical and conceptual problems arising within the statistical framework describing models of cosmological inflation, known collectively as the "measure problem" in multiverse cosmology. After reviewing various existing approaches and mathematical techniques developed in the past two decades for studying these issues, I describe a new proposal for a measure in the multiverse, called the reheating-volume (RV) measure. The RV measure is based on approximating an infinite multiverse by a family of progressively larger but finite multiverses. I give a detailed description of the new measure and its applications to generic models of eternal inflation of random-walk type and to landscape scenarios. The RV prescription is formulated differently for scenarios with eternal inflation of the random walk type and for landscape scenarios. I derive analytic formulas for RV-regulated probability distributions that is suitable for numerical computations.
