Guest: Dr. Eugene Lim
Professor
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/eugene-lim
King’s College London
Title: Can Cosmic Inflation actually begin?
Abstract:
Inflation is the paradigmatic theory of the early universe. It purports to solve the “old” cosmological problems by dynamically driving the universe to a smooth, flat and homogeneous state, hence rendering the choice of initial conditions irrelevant. Using numerical relativity, we test this premise and argue that whether inflation actually can begin depends both on the model and the initial conditions. We argue that this means that we need to think harder on what kind of theoretical problems actually solve, even if observational evidence is strong in favour of its existence.
