Is Inflationary Cosmology a widely accepted theory?
Inflation Cosmology is a very diverse area of study. There are many different theories from many different physicists that are under the umbrella of the term inflation. The basic ideas of inflation are widely accepted because the theory of inflation is so crucial to explaining the big bang theory. The inflation theory is not exactly verifiable, but it does fill in holes in the big bang theory. It is made believable because evidence of the big bang has been observed. The idea that inflation was a period of exaggerated universal expansion is now seen as an extension to the big bang theory, which is accepted by nearly the entire astrophysicist community.
Inflation may not be verifiable, but it explains loopholes in the big bang theory. These loopholes include questions about why the universe is flat and how the universe is so large, end to end. Inflation explains that there was a period of time after the big bang where the universe expanded by a factor of about 10^26 in a fraction of a second. This is obviously much faster than the current speed of light, but this idea explains how the universe flattened out. Because so much matter from the center of the universe was blasted out so quickly, any curvature in the “shape” of the universe from the beginning was flattened out in that fraction of a second. This is just like how the Earth seems flat to us, only on an astronomical scale.
The second problem of the big bang theory is that areas of space on opposite ends of the universe cannot possibly have been in contact with each other at the beginning of time (as is the idea of the big bang) because the time light takes to travel there is greater than the existence of the universe. Inflation solves this problem because the universe expanded so much faster than the current speed of light; it is believable that these far-flung regions of space were actually once in contact with each other before the big bang.
