Book excerpt: 'The Disordered Cosmos'

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Book excerpt: 'The Disordered Cosmos' : Read more

 

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"...So, in the beginning, we are maybe just talking about our single bubble, and before that bubble was a second old and certainly before there were any Standard Model particles wandering around, it likely underwent a rapid expansion where spacetime grew faster than the speed of light — because as we currently understand things, spacetime is the only phenomenon in the universe that can break the universal speed limit. This time period is called inflation, and it was first proposed by one of my research mentors at MIT, the wonderful Alan Guth. There's much we don't understand about inflation, including what exactly set it off. It didn't last very long — less than tenths of a fraction of a second — and when it was over, the universe continued to expand, albeit much more slowly."

My observation. There are a variety of threads on the expanding universe now on the forums. Using H0 = 69 km/s/Mpc (and different reports using different objects go up to 82 here now), using c.g.s. units, ~ 2.24 x 10^-18 cm/s/cm for H0. Very interesting to view expansion rates like this and the cosmological constant. During inflation, space could be expanding > 3 x 10^30 cm/s when you consider c near 3 x 10^10 cm/s. The rate of expansion really turned around in cosmology