the universe had a beginning. outside of our universe in absolute zero. so my question is this: in an absolute zero environment where did the first heat come from that sparked that first heat just long enough to make that chemical reaction to produce our universe and how did it stay lit for this long without help? Another question: absolute zero exists no where on this entire planet. so if you go to the coldest spot on earth (wherever that may be) and light a match and drop on the ice (or snow) what would happen next without any other fuel to keep that match lit????????

now go back to my former question and try again. Inflation theory does not work, cannot work, and there is no way to prove it, at all.

I was confused by the comparison of a scalar field with an electric or magnetic field. I tracked down the paper (I think) at "arXiv:0712.0778v1 [astro-ph] 5 Dec 2007" for those of us without institutional access to the journals. After skimming it I get the impression that the phase transition he is referring to is one similar to the breaking of symmetry that occurs at the electroweak transition (or perhaps the strong nuclear transition).

If I understand him correctly, (and my math is not what it once almost was) one might compare this (very roughly) to the phase transition that would occur at an expanding crystallization front if one dropped a seed crystal into a supercooled liquid. The expanding crystallization front would generate a pressure wave that would propagate away from that crystallizing front. In an analogous manner, gravitational waves would be generated by symmetry breaking in the early universe.

In any case, what I think I understand from this scalar fields aligning with each other, it just means that they take the same value at that point. For instance, you mention how temperature can be thought of as a scalar field. So if you were to place two objects with different temperatures in contact, the temperatures would equalize there (and then to the rest of both objects). So in a sense they get aligned. My guess is that they mean something similar to this, although I really don't know.

Interestingly, the electric field can be described by the gradient of scalar field, in the absence of time varying fields, called the electric potential V. Although the magnetic field always needs the curl of vector potential field (named A usually) to be described.

I'd like to see where it leads

(understanding little, but still engrossed!)

Richard Wigmans has proposed that some of what we are seeing is due to degenerate neutrinos. The question he raises is obvious. Since degenerate electrons fail to shift energy levels and become locked in such saturated energy levels, do degenerate neutrinos fail to oscillate? Did primordial neutrinos settle at the center of masses of galaxy clusters? Do they resist gravity just as degenerate electrons do as well and, by doing so, do they push away at the galaxies surrounding them instead of holding a dying star together, contributing to some of the expansion we are seeing?

I am sure that even that will be falsified but it does point to the fact that we have no present lock on an experiment for spatial inflation. Future experiments will likely uncover better experiments with better equipment.