Physical Society Colloquium

Special Physical Society Colloquium

Anthropic constraints on inflation

Leonard Susskind

Stanford University

It seems that the universe was born in episode of rapid exponential inflation that stretched its dimensions by at least a factor of ten to the twentieth. This phenomenon was originally invoked to explain why the universe is so fine tuned but it lead to it's own fine tuning problems. At the moment the only explanation of inflation is “anthropic”. I will explain how the anthropic principle can explain why the universe was fine tuned for exponential growth.