Is Our Universe a One-Off Fluke, or an Endless Cycle?
Paul Steinhardt is torn. On the one hand, he has been working on and contributing to the theory of inflation for decades. On the other hand, he thinks it may very well be wrong.
Inflation describes the early universe going through an unimaginably rapid expansion in its infancy, from the size of an atomic nucleus to something like the size of the current observable universe, in an infinitesimal fraction of a second. When it was proposed, in 1980, it promised to
