Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
Also given the incredibly short duration of inflation I do wonder about what they expect to be able to find...seems most ambitious.
Mind you as I have said many times I dont accept inflation and think it always was a patch that should have been replaced shortly after the fix☺...I cant understand why science disregards my concerns☺.
You may as well say inflation os synonymous for "instantaneous" for the time allocated to it...I can not accept that it all went from the size of a basket ball to greater than the observable universe in a zillionth of a zillionth of a zillionth of a second...to quote Neil de G.
Does the scientific community think inflation is reasonable or are there better ideas brewing?
Alex
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The period of inflation lasted from about 10^-36 s to around 10^-32 s after the Big Bang.
As to how big the Universe expanded in this period causes some confusion.
The size of the Universe may in fact be infinitely large; we don’t know its size true but since the Universe expands we know its scale changes.
We can only express the size of the Universe in terms of the observable Universe.
The cosmic scale of the Universe as it is now, is arbitrarily set as equal to one; the cosmic scale factor is the cosmic scale as it was at some point in the past divided by the current cosmic scale.
Using the cosmic scale factor calculated for immediately before and after inflation we can roughly calculate the size of the observable Universe over this time frame.
At 10^-36 s the size of the observable Universe was around 8 X 10^-30 meters, immediately after inflation was completed at 10^-32 s it expanded to around the size of a grain of sand.
Inflation still provides the best explanation of why the Universe is flat and causally connected.
Most importantly it is a falsifiable theory as inflation predicts the existence of low frequency gravitational waves and a particular type of polarization in the Cosmic Radiation Background.
Unfortunately a few years ago there was a premature announcement that inflation was confirmed as the polarization in the Cosmic Radiation Background was detected but the discovery was withdrawn after the polarization was found to caused by magnetic dust particles in our galaxy.