Can the universe afford inflation

By Andreas Albrecht, L. Sorbo. 2004

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cosmic inflation is envisioned as the 'most likely' start for the observed universe. To give substance to this claim, a framework is needed in which inflation can compete with other scenarios and the relative likelihood of all scenarios can be quantified. The most concrete scheme to date for performing such a comparison shows inflation to be strongly disfavored. We analyze the source of this failure for inflation and present an alternative calculation, based on more traditional semiclassical methods, that results in inflation being exponentially favored. We argue that reconciling the two contrasting approaches presents interesting fundamental challenges, and is likely to have a major impact on ideas about the early universe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/842fe42cf8489bec605afc2e2b71713f20b9405b

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Citations in the corpus

Holographic description of AdS cosmologies (2005, background): “[34] have performed an alternative calculation, in which they take the same starting point but calculate the relative probabilities from more traditional semiclassical tunneling rates (instead of invoking a principle (14)His estimate for the maximum possible entropy comes from putting all the matter”
Spontaneous inflation and the origin of the arrow of time (2004, background): “We would like to thank Anthony Aguirre, Andreas Albrecht, Raphael Bousso, Brian Greene, Alan Guth, James Hartle, Stefan Hollands, Andrei Linde, Lorenzo Sorbo, Wati Taylor, Alex Vilenkin, and Robert Wald for useful conversations (even if some of them remain skeptical of our conclusions).”
Thermodynamic Volumes and Isoperimetric Inequalities for de Sitter Black Holes (2013, methodology): “By assuming that non-black hole inhomogeneities follow the same entropy rule, this entropy increase has been used to estimate the probability that inflation occurs for a universe in “the landscape” [40].”
Sinks in the landscape, Boltzmann brains and the cosmological constant problem (2006, background): “They argued that the problem formulated in [28, 27, 25, 26] is very serious and cannot be resolved using the global description of inflation.”