The large-scale structure of the ambient boundary

Abstract

This article gives a review of a recent construction, the ambient cosmological metric, and its implications for the global geometry of the universe. According to this proposal, the universe is a bounding hypersurface carrying a conformal structure and lying at the (conformal) infinity of a new, 5-geometry which satisfies the Einstein equations with fluid sources. We discuss our main results about the implied topological nature of the conformal infinity of the ambient metric, the non-existence of spacetime singularities on the boundary, as well as the validity of cosmic censorship as a direct consequence of a new principle on the boundary.