Andrei Linde, then working at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, and Paul Steinhardt, then working with his student Andreas Albrecht at the University of Pennsylvania, discovered a way for the Higgs field’s relaxation to zero energy and pressure throughout all of space to happen even more efficiently and significantly more uniformly (thereby curing certain technical problems inherent to Guth’s original proposal11). They showed that if the potential energy bowl had been smoother and more gradually sloping, as in Figure 10.2, no quantum jumps would have been necessary: the Higgs field’s
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