Tag Archives: inflation

Friday Notes (May 17, 2024)

I’ve been a semi-surreal mood lately. From a combination of things. It’s an election year. Politics these days is bad enough, but the last few Presidential elections seem to have written a weird new normal. Now, one candidate is in a criminal trial and potentially could be jailed before the election.

I spent winter wondering if I’d have wasps in the house again come summer. I’ve found three so far. Still no clue how they get in. Looks like I need an exterminator. Another surreal bullet point: this past winter kinda… wasn’t. Oddly, I missed it.

The surreal aside, however, Friday Notes marches on.

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How Many Big Bangs?

Bang!!

I’m reading Our Mathematical Universe (2014), by Max Tegmark, and I’ll post about the book when I finish. However, he got my attention early with the topic of eternal inflation. That got me thinking about how there are some key unanswered questions regarding the Big Bang and inflation of the non-eternal sort.

Inflation certainly does need some explaining. It may be related to dark energy, as both seem to do the same sort of thing (push space apart). The putative physics of inflation is bad enough; eternal inflation is (in my view) fairy tale physics.

For one thing, eternal? Seriously? Infinite something from nothing?

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