Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

One scenario that cosmologists have considered imagines that the early universe was a frenzied and chaotic environment, and as a result the value of the inflaton field across space would have fluctuated wildly, somewhat like the surface of boiling water. To generate repulsive gravity and set off the bang, we need a small region of space in which the inflaton’s value was uniform (or very nearly so, taking into account quantum jitters). But finding such a uniform region amid the chaotic undulations would be like boiling a vat of water and finding a region on its agitated surface that had suddenly flattened. You have never seen that happen. Not because it’s impossible but because it’s extraordinarily unlikely. For a region of the vat’s randomly bubbling water to pass through the same height at the same moment yielding a flat, orderly, uniform, low-entropy configuration would require an astounding coincidence. Similarly, for the wildly undulating inflaton field to have acquired a uniform value within a small region of space, thus igniting inflationary expansion, would have required an astounding coincidence too. And without an explanation for how this special, orderly, low-entropy, uniform configuration came to be, physicists are deeply uneasy.8