Beyond the Inflationary Big Bang
The answer most people would likely give to the question of how the universe began is, the “Big Bang.” But it’s a fair guess that this same group of people do not know what the Big Bang is, or that it has in fact been replaced by another model known as the inflationary Big Bang. The interesting part of this story is why cosmologists decided to revise the standard Big Bang model in the first place. It turns out that the original Big Bang possessed a number of features that deeply perplexed scientific theorists. Two of these features are the smoothness problem and the flatness problem. Without getting into unnecessary details, the smoothness problem arises as a result of the near uniformity of the so-called cosmic background radiation — the supposed “afterglow” from the Big Bang. This background radiation happens to be uniform across the celestial sphere to 1 part in 100,000. How is...
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