Hartle-Hawking, anyone?
“Sometimes cosmology talks can be exciting – riveting even. Take, for instance, the occasion when a young graduate student called Alan Guth heard all about the serious problems with the big bang theory. It was so provocative and stimulating it led Guth, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to make one of the most audacious suggestions in science.
Guth’s idea is called inflation and it suggested that the major problems in cosmology could be solved if the universe had blown up like a balloon, inflating faster than the speed of light in the moments after its birth…”
Inflation deflated? The Big Bang’s Toughest Test – New Scientist
Interesting. Too bad I don’t have a subscription. On the other hand, I’m not surprised it’s a “snoozefest” as they say since it is well more than 25 years old now. In 20th/21st century physics that’s an eternity for a theory (plus, it’s not like it’s wrong – just incomplete, like everything else).