It is shown that Einstein's field equations for all perfect-fluid k = 0 FLRW cosmologies have the same form as the topological normal form of a fold bifurcation. In particular, we assume that the cosmological constant is a bifurcation parameter, and as such, fold bifurcation behaviour is shown to occur in a neighbourhood of Minkowski spacetime in the phase space. We show that as this cosmological constant parameter is varied, an expanding and contracting de Sitter universe emerge via this bifurcation.

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In this paper, we apply Osgood's criterion from the theory of ordinary differential equations to detect finite-time singularities in a spatially flat FLRW universe in the context of a perfect fluid, a perfect fluid with bulk viscosity, and a Chaplygin and anti-Chaplygin gas. In particular, we applied Osgood's criterion to demonstrate singularity behaviour for Type 0/big crunch singularities as well as Type II/sudden singularities. We show that in each case the choice of initial conditions is important as a certain number of initial conditions leads to finitetime, Type 0 singularities, while other precise choices of initial conditions which depend on the cosmological matter parameters and the cosmological constant can avoid such a finite-time singularity. Osgood's criterion provides a powerful and yet simple way of deducing the existence of these singularities, and also interestingly enough, provides clues of how to eliminate singularities from certain cosmological models.

Abstract. In this paper, we consider the problem of existence and uniqueness of solutions to the Einstein field equations for a spatially flat FLRW universe in the context of stochastic eternal inflation where the stochastic mechanism is modelled by adding a stochastic forcing term representing Gaussian white noise to the Klein-Gordon equation. We show that under these considerations, the KleinGordon equation actually becomes a stochastic differential equation. Therefore, the existence and uniqueness of solutions to Einstein's equations depend on whether the coefficients of this stochastic differential equation obey Lipschitz continuity conditions. We show that for any choice of V (φ), the Einstein field equations are not globally well-posed, hence, any solution found to these equations is not guaranteed to be unique. Instead, the coefficients are at best locally Lipschitz continuous in the physical state space of the dynamical variables, which only exist up to a finite explosion time. We further perform Feller's explosion test for an arbitrary power-law inflaton potential and prove that all solutions to the EFE explode in a finite time with probability one. This implies that the mechanism of stochastic inflation thus considered cannot be described to be eternal, since the very concept of eternal inflation implies that the process continues indefinitely. We therefore argue that stochastic inflation based on a stochastic forcing term would not produce an infinite number of universes in some multiverse ensemble. In general, since the Einstein field equations in both situations are not well-posed, we further conclude that the existence of a multiverse via the stochastic eternal inflation mechanism considered in this paper is still very much an open question that will require much deeper investigation.