The universe as a quantum gravity condensate

Understand

This is an introduction to the approach to the extraction of cosmological dynamics from full quantum gravity based on group field theory condensates.

• We outline its general perspective, which sees cosmology as the hydrodynamics of the fundamental quantum gravity degrees of freedom, as well as its concrete implementation within the group field theory formalism.
• We summarise recent work showing the emergence of a bouncing cosmological dynamics from a fundamental group field theory model, and provide a brief but complete survey of other results in the literature.
• Finally, we discuss open issues and directions for further research.