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…
