“We're essentially rewriting the whole story of cosmology”

摘要

COSMOLOGICAL inflation is the idea that, in its first moments, the universe underwent a sudden, extreme expansion.This is widely accepted because it explains why space-time is almost perfectly flat and why matter in the cosmos appears so smoothly distributed on the largest scales.Or does it? The trouble is that there are many versions of inflation, most of which wouldn't lead to the universe we observe - and the need for such "fine-tuning" of the theory to match observations makes some physicists nervous.