What If Cosmic Inflation Is Wrong?
The earliest stages of the Universe, before the Big Bang, are what set up the initial conditions that everything we see today has evolved from.
In February, a group of theorists, including one of inflation's co-founders, claimed that inflation had failed.
The mainstream group of inflationary cosmologists, including inflation's inventor, Alan Guth, wrote a rebuttal.
And earlier this week, a major publication and one of the rebuttal's co-signers highlighted and gave their perspective on the debate.
The expanding Universe, full of galaxies and complex structure we see today, arose from a smaller, hotter, denser, more uniform state.
There are three things going on here: the problems with the Big Bang that led to the development of cosmic inflation, the solution(s) that cosmic inflation provides and generic behavior, and subsequent developments, consequences, and difficulties with the idea. Is that enough to cast doubt on the entire enterprise? Let's lay it all out for you to see.
The stars and galaxies we see today didn't always exist, and the farther back we go, the closer to an apparent singularity the Universe gets, but there is a limit to that extrapolation.
We arrive at a point where galaxy clusters, individual galaxies or even stars haven't had time to form due to the influence of gravity. We can go even earlier, where the amount of energy in particles and radiation make it impossible for neutral atoms to form; they'd immediately be blasted apart. Even earlier, and atomic nuclei are blasted apart, preventing anything more complex than a proton or neutron from forming. Even earlier, and we begin creating matter/antimatter pairs spontaneously, due to the high energies present. And if you go all the way back, as far as your equations can take you, you'd arrive at a singularity, where all the matter and energy in the entire Universe were condensed into a single point: a singular event in spacetime. That was the original idea of the Big Bang.
If these three different regions of space never had time to thermalize, share information or transmit signals to one another, then why are they all the same temperature?
Why would the Universe be the same temperature everywhere? The different regions of space from different directions wouldn't have had time to exchange information and thermalize; there's no reason for them to be the same temperature. Yet the Universe, everywhere we looked, had the same background 2.73 K temperature.
In 1979, Alan Guth had a revelation that a period of exponential expansion in the Universe's past could set up and provide the initial conditions for the Big Bang.
The Universe is flat because inflation stretched it to be indistinguishable from flat; the part of the Universe that's observable to us is so small relative to how much inflation stretched it that it's unlikely to be any other way.
The Universe should be perfectly flat. Yes, that was one of the original motivations for it, but at the time, we had very weak constraints. 100% of the Universe could be in matter and 0% in curvature; 5% could be matter and 95% could be curvature, or anywhere in between. Inflation, quite generically, predicted that 100% needed to be "matter plus whatever else," but curvature should be 0%. This prediction has been validated by our ΛCDM model, where 5% is matter, 27% is dark matter and 68% is dark energy; curvature is still 0%.
There should be fluctuations on scales larger than light could have traveled since the Big Bang. This is another consequence of inflation, but there's no way to get a coherent set of fluctuations on large scales like this without something stretching them across cosmic distances. The fact that we see these fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background and in the large-scale structure of the Universe — and didn't know about them in the early 1980s — further validates inflation.
These quantum fluctuations, which translate into density fluctuations, should be adiabatic. Fluctuations could have come in different types: adiabatic, isocurvature, or a mixture of the two. Inflation predicted that these fluctuations should have been 100% adiabatic, which should leave unique signatures in both the cosmic microwave background and the Universe's large-scale structure. Observations bear out that yes, in fact, the fluctuations were adiabatic: of constant entropy everywhere.
There should be an upper limit, smaller than the Planck scale, to the temperature of the Universe in the distant past. This is also a signature that shows up in the cosmic microwave background: how high a temperature the Universe reached at its hottest. Remember, if there were no inflation, the Universe should have gone up to arbitrarily high temperatures at early times, approaching a singularity. But with inflation, there's a maximum temperature that must be at energies lower than the Planck scale (~1019 GeV). What we see, from our observations, is that the Universe achieved temperatures no higher than about 0.1% of that (~1016 GeV) at any point, further confirming inflation.
The final prediction of cosmic inflation is the existence of primordial gravitational waves. It is the only prediction to not be verified by observation... yet.
So inflation has a tremendous number of successes to its name. But since the late 1980s, theorists have spent a lot of time cooking up a variety of inflationary models. They've found some incredibly odd, non-generic behavior in some of them, including exceptions that break some of the predictive rules, above. In general, the simplest inflationary models are based on a potential: you draw a line with a trough or well at the bottom, the inflationary field starts off at some point away from that bottom, and it slowly rolls down towards the bottom, resulting in inflation until it settles at its minimum. Quantum effects play a role in the field, but eventually, inflation ends, converting that field energy into matter and radiation, resulting in the Big Bang.
The Universe we see today is based on the initial conditions it began with, which are dictated, predictively, by which model of cosmic inflation you choose.
The fluctuations in the CMB are based on primordial fluctuations produced by inflation. In particular, the 'flat part' on large scales (at left) have no explanation without inflation.
The shape of gravitational wave fluctuations is indisputable from inflation, but the magnitude of the spectrum is entirely model-dependent. Measuring this will put the debate over inflation to rest, but if the magnitude is too low to be detected over the next 25 years or so, the argument may never be settled.
The facts that no one disputes are that without inflation, or something else that's very much like inflation (stretching the Universe flat, preventing it from reaching high energies, creating the density fluctuations we see today, causing the Universe to begin at the same temperatures everywhere, etc.), there's no explanation for the initial conditions the Universe starts off with. Alternatives to inflation have that hurdle to overcome, and right now there is no alternative that has displayed the same predictive power that the inflationary paradigm brings. That doesn't mean that inflation is necessarily right, but there sure is a lot of good evidence for it, and many of the "possible" models that can be concocted have already been ruled out. Until an alternative model can achieve all of inflation's successes, cosmic inflation will remain the leading idea for where our hot Big Bang came from.