English

Inflationary Theory and Alternative Cosmology

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-11-07 v2 Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Popular Physics

Abstract

Recently Hollands and Wald argued that inflation does not solve any of the major cosmological problems. We explain why we disagree with their arguments. They also proposed a new speculative mechanism of generation of density perturbations. We show that in their scenario the inhomogeneities responsible for the large scale structure observed today were generated at an epoch when the energy density of the hot universe was 10^{95} times greater than the Planck density. The only way to avoid this problem is to assume that there was a stage of inflation in the early universe.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0206088,
  title  = {Inflationary Theory and Alternative Cosmology},
  author = {Lev Kofman and Andrei Linde and V. Mukhanov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0206088},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

17 pages, 1 fig, a discussion of a canonical measure of probability of inflation is added