IN THE beginning, there was inflation, or so we are told. I am not referring to American politics or the economy, but to a seemingly less contentious arena: the early universe.
Inflation - a brief period during which the universe expanded faster than the speed of light - remains the dominant paradigm of cosmology. And for good reason: it explains otherwise anomalous features of our universe, including the existence of stars and galaxies. Tiny ripples of quantum uncertainty stretched out to astronomical proportions: what could be more poetic?
Inflationary models, however, are so robust and malleable that it sometimes seems they can be tweaked to fit any observations - and from a scientific perspective, that's a problem. To decide whether a theory bears physical truth, one must be able to falsify it; a theory that can accommodate any observation is not a scientific theory at all.
Luckily, inflation does not ...
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