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A critical review of inflation

Neil Turok

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The theory of cosmic inflation offers an attractive resolution of some of the great paradoxes in cosmology: why the universe is so large, flat and uniform on large scales, and how density variations arose. Inflation has rightly dominated cosmological thinking for the past two decades, helping stimulate the development of high-precision observational programmes. The survival of simple inflationary models in the face of an impressive observational onslaught has been interpreted as convincing evidence of the correctness of the basic idea. In this paper, I review inflation, but highlight its weaknesses, explaining my reasons for believing that a more complete theory may supersede inflation without necessarily incorporating it.


PACS

98.80.Cq Particle-theory and field-theory models of the early Universe (including cosmic pancakes, cosmic strings, chaotic phenomena, inflationary universe, etc.)

95.30.Sf Relativity and gravitation

MSC

83F05 Cosmology

Subjects

Gravitation and cosmology

Astrophysics and astroparticles

Dates

Issue 13 (7 July 2002)

Received 2 May 2002

Published 12 June 2002



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