Informal HET Seminar

We shall review the evidence for a duality between 11-dimensional supergravity
(and hopefully M-theory) and the dynamics of a spinning massless particle on the
infinite-dimensional coset G(Z)\G/K(G) where G=E_{10} is the hyperbolic Kac-Moody extension of E_8. We focus on recent work (arXix:1406.1309) dealing with the quantum dynamics of the reduction of D=4 simple supergravity to a SU(2)-homogeneous cosmological model. Besides confirming the presence of hidden Kac-Moody structures, this study shows that the quantized contribution of the terms quartic in the Fermions generically leads to an avoidance of the zero-volume singularity, i.e. to a cosmological bounce. This suggests imposing the boundary condition that the wave function of the Universe vanish at zero volume, which leads to a type of final-state boundary condition when considering the big crunch inside a black hole.