One physicist's 'spectacular realization' fixed the Big Bang's biggest hole

In December 1979, Alan Guth was struggling to explain why the universe looks so flat and uniform in every direction. His answer, cosmic inflation, proposed that space itself expanded by a factor of at least 10^26 in a fraction of a second right after the Big Bang. He wrote 'SPECTACULAR REALIZATION' in his notebook that night, underlined twice.

— Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe — Physical Review D, 1981; notebook entry, Dec 1979
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