Inflation and CMB Questions - 14e - Intro to Astronomy Sessions

Inflation is a proposed early period in the early Universe that explains some potentially problematic aspects of the Cosmic Microwave Background. It's still debated whether inflation actually happened, but here we discuss some of the general ideas around the inflation model.
Full Series Playlist: • Intro to Astronomy Ses...
Please note that this was designed as an introductory survey of astronomy course, mostly for non-science majors, and does simplify many of the topics accordingly. I encourage people who are just getting into astronomy to use this as a jumping off point for more in depth studies. I've tried to edit out specific references to my course (regarding assignments, tests, etc.) but I might have missed some. Finally, scientific fields are constantly advancing, with new data and studies resulting in our ideas being continually improved. This means some of the ideas presented here may soon be out of date, so I again encourage people to continue to investigate whichever topics are of particular interest to you.
Opening Image Credit: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/...

[@Tordvergar]

Excellent presentation. Very clear, well laid-out, well-paced. I particularly appreciated that you clearly presented the Inflationary model and what prior problems it was created to address, without insisting that it must be true. I doubt it, especially because the mechanisms seem rather outrageous and lucky. And we already know the universe started with very low entropy. Why not a number of other wonderful initial conditions?

[@PhysicistMichael]

Appreciate the feedback. The inflation model seems to have some strong points, but a bunch of open questions and potential issues, so I try to not oversell anything. It would be great if we could successfully detect primordial gravitational waves (the ones that the BICEP2 experiment thought they had seen but regrettably jumped the gun on announcing; turned out it was a false positive) since that would give us a different, independent way to test the predictions of the model. Until then, I put this in the "intriguing possibility worth further exploration" category.