What is the latest on inflation in a layman sense? I read Guth's 1997 popular science book "the inflationary universe" some time ago and he put across a decent, if very arbitrary, case. It's been a while, and I may have forgotten even the pop science stuff. One of the things that bothered me was how we can talk about "false vacuum" and "super cooling" at such high energies and related concepts in an area much smaller quadrillions of times smaller than a proton and on very short time scales. It was refined in various ways to 'new inflation' and so on.

Anyway, today I hear that Guth still defends it.

But one of the other founders (mentioned in the pop book) Paul Steinhardt, thinks it's pretty much over. He thinks it doesn't explain anything. I think I watch a part of clip from him about something called slow contraction, but I had about 2 or 3 bottles of wine probably at the time. So I don't know anything about that.

I look on wikipedia (non political subject so hopefully not biased), and inflation is there. I see many pages of cosmology talking about inflation being more or less accepted to some extent.