Creation and evolution of compactified cosmologies

introduced the study of the evolution of such models in a simple context we then go on to study a more realistic case. We present, with a wide variety of generalisations, cosmological solutions which are the analogues of the rolling radii solutions of string cosmology for the case where five branes are present in the bulk of the Heterotic M-theory orbifold. Many theories of particle physics rely on the existence of more than three spatial dimensions. In this thesis we consider various aspects of the cosmologies associated with such theories. The extra dimensions must be hidden in some manner and in all the cases we shall consider this is achieved by the mechanism of compactification. We start by considering a possible description of the quantum mechanical creation of such universes. A consistent description of this type would be extremely desirable because it would remove the vacua selection problems which plague such theories, increasing their predictive power markedly. The formalism we employ is that due to Hartle and Hawking. We are able to illustrate a serious problem in combining this approach to quantum cosmology with higher dimensional theories. We find that, for the wide range of theories considered, the Hartle Hawking proposal predicts that we should directly observe all the dimensions of space. This is clearly inconsistent with observation. We then proceed to consider the evolution of various examples of higher dimensional cosmologies. All the examples considered contain brane sources. We start with a simple example of such a theory in order to examine an inflationary scenario that has been proposed in the literature. This scenario utilises the large extra dimensions which are possible in brane world theories in an attempt to solve some of the fine tuning problems which occur in inflationary models. Havin