Big Steve and the State of the Universe

Abstract

I share some reminiscences of the late Steven Weinberg. Then I discuss a topic in quantum field theory which he taught me: the role of state wave functionals in deriving the iǫ term of the Feynman propagator when using the functional formalism. This is perhaps a curiosity for in-out scattering amplitudes on flat space backgrounds, but it is has much greater significance for the in-in amplitudes of the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism in cosmology. It also touches on the fate, about which Weinberg wondered, of the large logarithms one sometimes finds in quantum corrections from inflationary particle production.