Inflation
From PhiloWiki
Did the universe undergo a period of inflation?
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Christian views
- Strobel states that the theory of inflation is "suspect" and "appears to be motivated by a philosophical bias" [Case for a Creator, pp 106-107].
- Resources are needed. Feel free to find and add resources.
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Secular views
- "Inflation is the name given to a hypothetical period of extremely rapid expansion that occurs very early in the history of the Universe. It was proposed by Alun Guth in 1980 as a neat way of solving the major problems with the standard description of the universe, the Hot Big Bang model. Inflation isn't an alternative to the Hot Big Bang, it is an extra. The Big Bang description of steady expansion from a very hot and dense phase full of quantum particles into a cooler and less dense universe full of stars and galaxies is still regarded as correct, it is now preceeded by the inflationary stage which then 'exits' into the Hot Big Bang stage."
- "The 'inflationary scenario', developed by Starobinsky and by Guth, offers a solution to the flatness-oldness problem and the horizon problem. The inflationary scenario invokes a vacuum energy density. We normally think of the vacuum as empty and massless, and we can determine that the density of the vacuum is less than 10-29 gm/cc now. But in quantum field theory, the vacuum is not empty, but rather filled with virtual particles."
- "Guth suggested that a hypothetical particle named an 'inflation' could have have got into a highly energetic state in the Big Bang that essentially caused gravity to go into reverse, becoming repulsive instead of attractive, for an instant, about 10E-35 second, swelling the primeval fireball from a tiny size into cosmic dimensions. During this period of 'inflation', the Universe would expand much faster than the speed of light. Although current physics rules out the propagation of anything through space faster than the speed of light, it imposes no such restriction on space itself.
- This short period of inflation would create a Universe that was flat or very close to flat, and smooth out nonuniformities in the state of the Universe, while simultaneously leaving subtle nonuniformities that would later give rise to galaxies and other structures."
- "It was a true Eureka moment if there ever was one. On the night of December 6, 1979, an obscure Stanford Linear Accelerator Center postdoc was up late, sweating over an even more obscure problem about particles called magnetic monopoles. Looking at his calculations the next day, the usually low-key Alan Guth annotated the words 'SPECTACULAR REALIZATION' at the top of the page. Guth had discovered cosmic inflation, an idea which some have later called the most important in cosmology since the big bang."
- "Our universe with a size of about 1026 meters (as limited by the event horizon) is just a speck in comparison to this vast expand. The number of ways to arrange matter in the space outside our universe is enormous and each one would have its own event horizon (size); these are the parallel universes. Statistically, an arrangement similar to ours is bound to happen given enough space. Thus there would be universes identical to ours somewhere. However, we cannot communicate with any of these parallel universes because the speed of light is finite."
