Inflation 4

For all who care the skiing trip was wonderful. There was enough snow to hold me off till the end of November. Anyway, back to trying to understand inflation. Ok, so I think in order to understand why inflation works (no I still don’t know how it works), we need to take a moment to talk about the way the universe expands. So… you have space (which is a 3 dimensional lattice with stuff sitting in it, like in the 1st picture), and as it expands it sort-of stretches and pull the space time continuum along with it. And that’s why everything moves away from us. It’s not that we are at the center of the universe and everything is moving away from us. It’s just that we have everything being pulled away from us in all directions; the whole thing is being stretched. Now there is this thing about horizons and (if I have this all straight in my head) it goes like the picture illustrates. The red line represents our horizon, the part we can’t see outside of (look at the second picture). If the universe were to expand and our horizon didn’t then our field of vision would actually look smaller (like in third picture), and I think this is what happens in expansion. But I’m not sure how this helps. Perhaps I shall figure this out tomorrow.