From the get-go, inflation gave the universe an amazing deal. A jump to lower entropy within a tiny nugget of space was leveraged by inflationary expansion into the vast reaches of the cosmos. And, of utmost importance, the inflationary stretching didn’t just yield any old large universe. It yielded our large universe—inflation explains the shape of space, it explains the large-scale uniformity, and it even explains the “smaller”-scale inhomogeneities such as galaxies and temperature variations in the background radiation.
