Wormholes as an alternative origin story for the universe

The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal has long been the leading framework for the universe's initial conditions, but it suffers from known instabilities and ambiguities. This essay argues that Euclidean wormholes — saddle-point geometries in the path integral over spacetime — expand the viable set of initial states while sidestepping those problems. The wormhole approach aligns with holographic expectations from quantum gravity and broadens the landscape of physically consistent early-universe models. The piece is a review-style essay rather than a primary research report.