
Paul Steinhardt, "Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale" (Open Agenda, 2021)
New Books in the History of Science
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Is the Universe Contracting?
According to the big bang theory, distant regions to be seen in the universe hadn't been in causal contact before. The idea of inflation was to say they were much closer together in the past, and then they were thrown apart during inflation. So you immediately get around the contact problem. Ah, another thing you Immediately get around is the flatness problem. It was solving it by not setting it to zero, but by suppressing it by a huge amount,. And then after inflation ended, it begins to grow again. But you suppressed it so much that even to day, it's immeasurably small. That would solve that problem. Actually, the universe didn't begin at the big
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