Houston, we have a problem
While most cosmologists agree that the big bang is the most reasonable explanation for the origin of the universe, it is not without its problems. One principle problem is that the universe is too big by several orders of magnitude. The age of the universe is estimated at 13.7 billion years (I am using billion in the American sense of thousand-million, not the British sense of million-million). It is assumed to have a naïve radius of 13.7 billion light years or a diameter of 27.4 billion light years. However, based on current understanding of how energy, particles and fundamental forces interact, this is too big - 300 million light years would be much more reasonable. To resolve this, it has been proposed that shortly after coming into existence, the universe underwent a period of extreme inflation where it expanded exponentially rapidly. Introducing the concept of hyperinflation also resolves a number of other issues such at the universe having too uniform a horizon. If the universe h...