New action for cosmology

Sloan, David (2021) New action for cosmology. Physical Review D, 103 (4): 043524. ISSN 1550-7998

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Abstract

We present a new action which reproduces the cosmological sector of general relativity in both the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker and Bianchi models. This action makes no reference to the scale factor and is of a frictional type first examined by Herglotz. We demonstrate that the extremization of this action reproduces the usual dynamics of physical observables, and the symplectification of this action is the Einstein-Hilbert action for cosmological models. We end by discussing some of the increased explanatory power produced by considering the reduced physical ontology resulting from eliminating scale.