Cosmic Inflation and the Origin of the Universe

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This is part of my complete intro Astronomy class that I taught at Willam Paterson University and CUNY Hunter. If you want to watch all the videos in the correct order, please visit my website at http://www.jasonkendall.com

The Inflationary Epoch happened or something nearly exactly like it, happened when the universe was extremely young. During the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) Era, the universe became the nearly flat, critical-density Cosmos we see today. In order to understand it, we have to bring in an incomplete theory: Quantum Gravity. We use this to approximate the wild phase transitions that must have occurred in order to force the expansion of space at speeds exponentially greater than light! From an early quantum foam, arose a false-vaccuum that contained all the energy of the cosmos. Oddly enough, this epoch can be observed as effects of gravitational waves on CMB. The Inflationary Epoch solves a number of problems associated with the Standard Big Bang model. It also raises some wild questions about the nature of the origin of the cosmos.

Supplement the videos with OpenStax Astronomy
https://openstax.org/books/astronomy/pages/29-thinking-ahead
29: The Big Bang

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)
The basics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch
Inflationary epoch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)
Cosmological Inflation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann_equations#Density_parameter
Critical Density

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory
Grand Unified Theory (GUT)

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_theory
Grand Unified Theory (GUT): elementary…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity
Quantum Gravity

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity
Quantum Gravity: simpler…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_transition
Phase Transition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BICEP_and_Keck_Array
BICEP2 attempt to see effects of gravitational waves on CMB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum
False Vacuum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam
Quantum Foam