Barque said:
Doesn't this reply connote a certain denial of "clumps" of matter? Certainly, things were not all smoothed out?
Evidently you didn't grasp what "during inflation there is nothing else in the universe" means. Inflation happens
before there is any matter. What you call "matter" gets created when inflation
ends, and all the energy that was stored in the scalar field gets transferred to the usual Standard Model fields we know--quarks, leptons, etc. During inflation the scalar field is the only thing there is, and it doesn't clump.
Barque said:
the scalar field you speak of seems to be more mathematically derived than observationally confirmed.
The Higgs field is a scalar field. Not the same one as the one that appears in inflation models, but the fact remains that we
do have observational evidence that scalar fields in general can exist.
Barque said:
"Scales" has nothing to do with a scalar field. "Scalar" means "zero spin".
Barque said:
huge masses of energy crashing together. if things were all homogenous then there wouldn't be clumps?
See my response to the first quote above.
Barque said:
all mass was distributed.
There is no "mass" in the sense you mean the term during inflation; there is no matter in the universe. See my response to the first quote above.
Barque said:
My question was about gravitational effects during inflation
No, your question was about gravitational
waves during inflation.
If you want to talk about gravitational "effects" more generally, inflation
is a gravitational effect--it's the gravitational effect of a scalar field when it's the only field in the universe that contains any energy.
Barque said:
Barque said:
Given these admissions of yours, you should have a very low level of confidence in your ability to come up with correct intuitive answers about how inflation works.
Barque said:
and the poke seemed harsh to me
What poke?
Barque said:
can you bother to accommodate a layperson?
I am accommodating you: I'm explaining why your intuition about inflation is wrong. What else would you expect?