B. Evolution of the cosmos and life: Eternal inflation, “many worlds in one,” anthropic selection, and a rough estimate of the probability of the origin of life1
A brief nontechnical introduction to inflationary cosmology
The “many worlds in one” (MWO) model that is essential to the cosmological perspective on the origin of life introduced in Chapter 12 is a consequence of inflational cosmology. At the end of the twentieth century, it had replaced the classical Big Bang model of the evolution of the universe. Inflation is the period of the exponentially fast initial expansion of a universe (Guth, 2001, 1998b). Alan Guth developed the inflation model to account for several key astronomic observations for which the Big Bang cosmology had no explanation: ...
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