23. The Big Bang, Inflation, and General Cosmology 2

Transcript: Throughout most of the history of the universe structures have been forming under the action of gravity. Re... Read more

Transcript: As we trace events in the universe back toward the big bang, the first important epoch reached is a time abo... Read more

Transcript: Inflation is an extraordinary idea. What is the evidence in favor of it, and is it even possible to test so... Read more

Transcript: How does the idea of inflation explain some of the problems of the standard big bang model? First, by stret... Read more

Transcript: In 1981, MIT physicist Alan Guth was looking for possible explanations for the smoothness and flatness of th... Read more

Transcript: One of the very difficult things to explain in standard cosmology is the flatness of space. Remember that t... Read more

Transcript: The big bang model has considerable predictive and explanatory power, but there’s some fundamental questions... Read more

Transcript: The big bang model provides a good description of the current universe which is large and cold and mostly em... Read more

Transcript: The fact that the early universe had a phase of superluminal or faster than light expansion means that it is... Read more

Transcript: Astronomers make a distinction between the physical universe, all that there is, and the observable universe... Read more