You see, by the end of the inflationary phase, space was stretched smooth and so the gravitational contribution to entropy—the entropy associated with the possible bumpy, nonordered, nonuniform shape of space—was minimal. However, when the inflaton field slid down its bowl and relinquished its pent-up energy, it is estimated to have produced about 1080 particles of matter and radiation. Such a huge number of particles, like a book with a huge number of pages, embodies a huge amount of entropy. Thus, even though the gravitational entropy went down, the increase in entropy from the production of
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