Cosmology as Relativistic Particle Mechanics: From Big Crunch to Big Bang

Cosmology can be viewed as geodesic motion in an appropriate metric on an ‘augmented’ target space; here we obtain these geodesics from an effective relativistic particle action. As an application, we find some exact (flat and curved) cosmologies for models with N scalar fields taking values in a hyperbolic target space for which the augmented target space is a Milne universe. The singularities of these cosmologies correspond to points at which the particle trajectory crosses the Milne horizon, suggesting a novel resolution of them, which we explore via the Wheeler-DeWitt equation.