Cosmic inflation and the origin of the universe
With Hans Böhringer
Currently, the most successful model to explain the characteristics of our universe contains some very speculative elements. This includes not only the so-called dark matter and dark energy but also the idea of a "cosmic inflation" in the very early universe. During this epoch, it is assumed that the universe expanded with incredible speed, powered by a vacuum field.
Actually, there is currently no physical cause to accept such a hypothesis. However, with this idea in mind, many properties of our universe can be explained, such as the large scale uniformity, the expansion of the universe detected by Hubble, and the large scale structure. Last year the ESA satellite mission PLANCK published their results and these show in even more detail how well this idea matches the observations.