This is not the only proposal for how inflationary expansion may have gotten off the ground. Andrei Linde, one of inflationary cosmology’s pioneers, has quipped that for every three researchers there are at least nine opinions on the matter.9 So we must leave to future research, theoretical and observational, a more definitive answer for how a small region of space became uniformly filled with an inflaton field, thus setting off a burst of spatial expansion. For now, we will simply assume that one way or another, the early universe transitioned into this low-entropy, highly ordered
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