But it would be too strong to conclude that the observations prove that a burst of inflationary expansion happened. When focusing on cosmological events that took place billions of years ago, at an energy scale likely millions of billions of times what we can probe in the laboratory, the best we can do is piece together observations and calculations to build confidence in our explanations. If an inflationary burst were the only way to understand the cosmological data then our confidence would head closer to certainty, but over the years imaginative scientists have developed alternative
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