Inflation Is a Bridge between Microcosm and Macrocosm

Inflation occurs under the influence of a scalar field called the inflaton. To visualize a phenomenon so far from ordinary experience requires a particular effort of imagination, but it is possible. The small inhomogeneities in the distribution of matter in the observable Universe are the effect imprinted on a cosmological scale by quantum fluctuations that occurred during inflation

What determined that sudden, unimaginable expansion of the Universe to which Guth gave the name of inflation? Can such an extraordinary phenomenon be justified from a physical point of view, or is it just an ad hoc conjecture designed to solve the problems left open by the Big Bang theory? Let’s try to understand it.

The physical explanation of the process put forward by inflation theorists has to do with the existence of so-called scalar fields. In its essence, a scalar field is a region of space in which a mathematical function allows to associate a scalar value to each point, that is, a quantity defined only by a number. Scalar fields affect the properties of elementary particles and, if they…