What do you think about the Big Bang?

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Henning Makholm
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Re: What do you think about the Big Bang?

Post by Henning Makholm » Tue Jul 13, 2010 11:20 pm

swainy wrote:I did ask if the Graph was misleading.
Graphs and illustations about inflation seem to be misleading more often than not. Take, for example, this one from Wolfgang Rindler's otherwise excellent Relativity: Special, General and Cosmological:
Fix 18.6 on p. 411 of 2nd Edition
Fix 18.6 on p. 411 of 2nd Edition
inflation.png (17.38 KiB) Viewed 338 times
This graph is typical in that it shows a knee in the "inflation" curve with a very large negative R'' right around tEI (the end of inflation). However, to the best of my understanding, the inflationary model does not in fact contain such a knee, and dR/dt is continuous across the end of inflation. Since the expansion during inflation is supposed to have been exponential (R'/R constant), this means that inflation in fact places the beginning of time longer ago than the standard FRW models (which is actually how it manages to get around the homogeneity problem).
Henning Makholm

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