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The Universe in a Wine Glass: How New Worlds Are Born ✛ ✎ ✦

Original: "Birth of Inflationary Universes via Wineglass Wormholes and their No-Boundary Relatives"
· George Lavrelashvili, Jean-Luc Lehners
arXiv:2605.10548v1 · 2026-05-11 · arXiv non-exclusive · independent analysis · 1 min
HEP Theory General Relativity
A microscopic bridge, shaped like a wine glass, can give birth to an entire universe.

Immediately after the Big Bang, according to the theory of Alan Guth, space instantly inflated. The cause of the jolt remained a mystery: calculations break down at the point of infinite density.

Physicists found an answer at the quantum level: microscopic bridges — wormholes — in the fabric of spacetime. If such a bridge carries an axion field or a magnetic charge, it stretches into the shape of a wine glass. The bowl is our inflating universe, the stem is a narrow neck, and the base is the parent world.

The weaker the charge, the thinner the stem and the longer inflation lasts. The glow of the cosmic microwave background — the echo of the Big Bang — suggests that our glass arose with nearly zero charge, which is why the universe is so smooth.

At the zero limit, the stem disappears. The glass loses its connection to the base, turning into a bubble with dark energy. This is exactly the picture of 'birth from nothing' painted by Hawking. Now both scenarios are just edges of one shape. The quantum wine glass becomes the cradle of creation: it gives a beginning without a singularity and accelerates growth.

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At the zero-charge limit, the stem disappears, and the wine glass turns into two disconnected objects: an inflating bubble and a void. This is how the theory unites two seemingly opposite scenarios of the universe's birth.

In the movie 'Interstellar,' wormholes are passages between galaxies, but here they give birth to entire universes, remaining invisible quantum bridges.

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.
Scientists
Alan GuthAlexander FriedmannAndrei LindeGeorges LemaîtreJames PeeblesBernhard Riemann
Concepts
eternal inflation inflationary cosmology Wormhole inflaton inflation inflationary gravitational waves gravitational instanton traversable wormhole de sitter space cosmological collider planck time exponential growth spacetime foam throat cosmic expansion stellar nursery instanton starobinsky inflation spacetime emergence quantum ripples