Posts tagged inflation

Every economy has to answer two questions: how much to produce and how to distribute that production. Technological advances ensure that each year we can make more stuff with less labor and capital than the year before. This has not changed. What has changed is how we allocate the benefits of progress. Back in the day, workers got the money; today, owners of assets do. Stagnant wages and higher stock prices are two sides of the same coin.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/why-your-rent-is-so-high-and-your-pay-is-so-low-tom-streithorst

This announcement has implications far beyond the field of cosmology. If the detection is confirmed, and inflation theory is eventually accepted, particle physicists will also be intrigued. According to inflation theory, a quantised particle called the inflaton exists, and is hypothesized to be responsible for cosmic inflation in the very early universe. So as physicist Richard Easther, points out, “we’re not just looking at the beginning of the universe, we are exploring undiscovered vistas in particle physics.”

http://decelerator.blogspot.sg/2014/03/first-direct-evidence-of-cosmic.html

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/science/space/detection-of-waves-in-space-buttresses-landmark-theory-of-big-bang.html?_r=1