Mixmaster Behavior in Inhomogeneous Cosmological Spacetimes

Abstract

Numerical investigation of a class of inhomogeneous cosmological spacetimes shows evidence that at a generic point in space the evolution toward the initial singularity is asymptotically that of a spatially homogeneous spacetime with mixmaster behavior. This supports a long-standing conjecture due to Belinskii et al. on the nature of the generic singularity in Einstein's equations.