Universes in Wine Glasses: How Wormholes Reconciled the Irreconcilable ✦

Original: "Birth of Inflationary Universes via Wineglass Wormholes and their No-Boundary Relatives"

· George Lavrelashvili, Jean-Luc Lehners

arXiv:2605.10548v1 · 2026-05-11 · CC BY · ⏱ 1 min · HEP Theory General Relativity

Quantum wormholes whose scale factor resembles a wine glass have shown that tunneling from primordial foam and birth from 'nothing' à la Hawking are one mechanism, two phases of the same process.

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The quantum birth of worlds lurked in the shape of wine glasses. Mathematics of Euclidean wormholes draws a scale factor with a bowl, stem, and base. It turns out, the thinner the stem, the more likely the universe's birth. And when the charge zeroes out, the throat disappears, and Hawking's creation from 'nothing' becomes just a limiting case. Physicists obtained a unified family where inflation arises naturally, and the measure problem—why we got this particular universe—gains new sharpness.

🎯 The scale factor of these wormholes traces the profile of a wine glass: the wide bowl is the future universe, the thin stem is the throat, and the base is the distant asymptotic region. Hence the poetic name physicists gave their solution.

🎬 If in 'Interstellar' a wormhole is a portal to another galaxy, here it's a quantum cradle of universes, frozen in Euclidean time.

S_E = 2\pi^2 \int d\tau \left( -3 a \dot{a}^2 + \frac{1}{2} a^3 \dot{\phi}^2 - 3a + a^3 V(\phi) + \frac{Q_a^2}{a^3} + \frac{Q_m^2}{a} \right)

The action determines the weight of a configuration in the path integral: Ψ ∼ exp(-S_E).

-S_{E} = \frac{12\pi^2}{V_{top}}

For V_top=1 (in Planck units), the weight is about 118.4, which is the limit for low-charge wine-glass wormholes.

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Universes in Wine Glasses: How Wormholes Reconciled the Irreconcilable ✦