In the book The End of Physics, by David Lindley (Harper Collins
Publishers, NY 1993) the author sums up his analysis of Inflation with
the following words: "...the need for fine-tuning the initial conditions of
the universe has been obviated by fine-tuning the Higgs mechanism
instead. In this sense, inflation is not the greatest triumph of particle
physics in cosmology but its greatest misapplication... with inflation,
particle physicists have begun to design theories whose sole purpose is
not to solve a problem in particle physics but to make cosmologists
happy. Inflation is a nice idea; it would be pleasing if particle physics
worked in such a way that it made the universe large and uniform. But
there is no substantial evidence that inflation actually occurred... The
argument is circular — cosmologists like inflation because particle
physicists can provide it, and particle physicists provide it because
cosmologists like it — and has proved, so far, immune to test" (p. 182).
Ten years later there is still no experimental proof of inflation; still
less, of the Grand Unified Theory of fundamental forces used as a basis
for postulating and describing the inflationary process. In the meantime,
other ideas have been proposed that depart from conventional wisdom
and that describe the universe and its evolution in drastically new terms:
the MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) of Mordehai Milgrom, that
obviates the need for Dark Matter to explain the rotation curves of
galaxies, and the varying speed of light in the vacuum as a function of
time of Magueijo and others, with the possible answer to the uniformity
of the universe in scales separated by distances unbridgeable by energy
transfer at the present speed of light. Other data, implying possible