[sjastro]

Your view is of no surprise as I take all that I read as having another view point ... some say we started with a seed and others say the big bang was all over..and perhaps both may be correct for even if the size of a grapefuit the Universe is indeed the universe and, as it is all that is, a comparrision to anything we can relate to will be difficult no doubt.

Clearly both cannot be correct. If the Universe expanded to a diameter of 160 billion light years in 30 seconds we wouldn't be having this conversation. The Universe would be big, have an open geometry, and very much dead as its' density would be far too low to allow matter to coalesce into planets, stars, galaxies and ultimately life.

Still my defence is simply it was out there someplace and I will not take responsibility for inventing my current belief as to what is laid down by "inflation" or anything that would lend support for the notion of inflation..

Why this fixation on Inflation? Your beliefs fly in the face of Science in general so you might as well add SR, GR, QM, and Newtonian physics to the list to name a few.

I simply dont buy it and I really feel that in doing so we may not pursue a more suitable and reasonable view...inflation has stopped questions asked that inflation sought to satisfy.

Sounds as if you are describing the Anthropic principle instead of Inflation.
Inflation arose to specifically tackle the flatness and horizon problems of Cosmology.

Still an expansion from an atom to the size of a grapfruit is a rather huge jump in size..relatively..and perhaps it is even easier to cast doubt upon the theory and its reasonableness as we can comprehend something very small and how magical it would be therefore even if say an ant were to expand in size such that it now matches a grap fruit..in a mere fraction of a second... I mean how could such a thing happen.

There is nothing magical about it. It's an unfortunate situation that to understand physics (and not just Inflation) one needs to understand the mathematics behind it. Otherwise one is forced to accept a theory on "good faith" or throw one's hands up in the air and say it can't be right because it is misunderstood or found to be counter-intuitive.

We talk of "space time" as if when such words are invoked we must accept mysterious notions as being reasonable but "space time" is not a mystery it is a geometric way of setting out what we observe in terms humans can work with....and I still suspect that the theory was grabed too eagerly in order to save the then dieing notion of the big bang...

Sorry Alex we live in a world where our technology confirms the existence of space time as reality from widely different perspectives such as the SR correction of time in GPS satellites to nucleur energy where E=mc2 is based on the conservation of energy in space time.

Hope all is well in your Universe Steven

Likewise Alex.

Steven