Re: Question for Cosmologists

Inflation is what happened in a fraction of time after the big bang. The
observed long term change in the cosmological constant would affect the
acceleration of the universe in time which was smaller in the past than
in the present (assuming that the results hold). As I have pointed out
the error bars are sufficiently large.

During the inflationary period, a very large cosmological constant
stretches cosmological perturbations beyond the Hubble radius.
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Watson/Watson5.html

(^19 Actually, Lambda does not have to be a constant; in-fact, it can be
a function of time. Such vacuum energies are referred to as
Quintessence, or Dark energy, and are the subject of much research.)

See http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CMB-MN-03/Munich-07Nov05-clean.pdf
for some good overviews

Rich Blinne wrote:

> You guys seem to have a good handle on this. Please help uncloud my
> thinking because I don't seem to get it.
>
> For the cosmological constant w0 is -1 and w' is 0. What is being
> proposed is w0 = -1.3 and w' = 1.55. Maybe I am making a sign error
> here but it seems that inflation decreases as you go back in time.
> Don't you need the highest inflation at highest z for fine-tuning to
> be solved? I grant George's point about extrapolating from z = 6.3.
> Details can be found here <http://http://www.phys.lsu.edu/GRBHD/>.
>
> Confusedly Yours,
> Rich
>
>
Received on Fri Jan 13 13:11:34 2006