Cosmic inflation preceded the Big Bang

Dipping toes in flat earth community, when I still believed that its largely a 'for the lulz' community, there are predictable patters of how those are formed and propagated/sustained.

There are few opinion makers that use techno/science babble to create theories that have easy to grasp headline so it easily spreads as a meme in the community.

I strongly believe vast majority of those people are scams, selling books to their followers. But their followers dont read anything but their own post,headlines, materials. All easy reads exposing some secret knowledge kept from the people.

In fact those communities are almost identical to religions, only their dogmas are still shifting, forming, spliting and evolving. But one universal mechanism for all is conformity to the dogma, any outsider get shutdown as an enemy and their ideas gets thrown away.

How do you define "fringe theory"? I'm pretty sure inflation has been the mainstream view among cosmologists since the 1980s.

The author correctly notices that it is a mistake to extrapolate the Big Bang theory too far, because from some point there is no more evidence for what happened before.

After this correct observation, then the author proceeds with a hypothesis about a prior "inflation", for which there is also no evidence, like for the more traditional Big Bang variants that are criticized.

I believe that it is necessary to always make a clear distinction between facts that are reasonably certain and facts that are just wild hypotheses, which are interesting to discuss, but for which there exists no information that could either confirm or refute them.

What we know with reasonable certainty is that the composition and evolution of the observable universe can be explained very convincingly if it started from an initial state of very high temperature, equivalent with a kinetic energy per particle of several tens of megaelectronvolt, i.e. higher than the binding energy of atomic nuclei.

At this temperature, the matter consisted of a plasma containing free protons, neutrons, electrons and positrons (plus neutrinos and photons).

There were equal numbers of protons and neutrons (i.e. equal numbers of u and d quarks) and slightly more electrons than positrons, the excess being enough to make the plasma electrically neutral.

At this stage, besides the very high temperature, the average density was also much higher than today. The matter composing the currently observable universe would have been concentrated in a much smaller space than today, but that space would have been huge nonetheless.

There is no evidence whatsoever about what might have happened before this stage.

The popular presentations of the Big Bang theory assume that before this stage there were even higher temperatures and densities.

This hypothesis might seem more satisfying intellectually, i.e. that everything might have started from a point, but it must be clear that there is no reason to believe this, except personal preferences about what to believe when there is no information about something.

If we extrapolate backwards to higher temperatures, the plasma composition becomes more and more complex, first it also includes pions and muons and then more and more kinds of particles that are normally unstable. After some point, we no longer can predict anything with reasonable accuracy. We must not forget that the current physics cannot predict simple things like the mass ratios between nuclei or the atomic spectra, so expecting a good model for a state of matter for which we do not have any experimental data would be naive.

Maybe before the known initial state there were indeed higher temperature and density states as in the popular Big Bang presentations and the Universe cooled to reach that state, but maybe the earlier temperatures were lower and something increased the temperature, like the author of the article supposes.

We do not know anything that might have heated the Universe, but if the Universe was previously hotter we also do not know anything that could have provided the initial energy and we do not know how matter would behave at those higher temperatures and densities.

So either way we exit the domain of quantitative models that can be fitted to match what we see around us and we enter the domain of speculations, which might be or not be of any use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_(string_theory)

Penrose has far more insight into the mathematics of the beginning and ending of the universe than your average genius-cosmologist. Yet claims for supporting data from CMB analysis (residual cold-spots from black holes in past epochs) should have been confirmed by now. So far as I know, those results haven't been repeated and all occur within error margins.

The book isn't particularly about the Big Bang (it's more about the nature of the arrow of time), but it has to deal with the subject in passing.

I can also recommend the video series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe [1]. These are a superb explanation of how modern science has arrived at the conclusions it has. You can jump ahead to the Cosmology video, if you must, but you're missing the full experience of building up an understanding that goes far beyond the usual crayon drawings the press gives us.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxZJcWcrxH3j...

- and that's how ladies and gents, you fake knowing economics

P.S. the article is not related to economics