More precisely, Guth’s calculations revealed that if a tiny region, perhaps as small as a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter across, was suffused with a certain type of energy field (called the inflaton field, with the missing “i” being an intentional if quirky naming convention), and if the energy was distributed uniformly, like steam whose density is the same throughout a sauna, the repulsive gravitational push would be so forceful that the speck of space would inflate explosively, almost instantaneously stretching to as large as the observable universe, if not far larger.
