Hubble

[ZenGum]

Inflation is just a theory that some whitecoats were twisted into to explain the observable facts. It is not clear what could drive it.

The really weird thing is that the expansion of the universe seems to be speeding up.

I was about to post a general link to New Scientist magazine which regularly runs accessible articles about this kind of stuff, but I went and checked and their lead story RFN is about exactly this stuff. The European Space Agency is about to launch the Plank satellite to study it.

[The cosmic microwave background (CMB)] ...was released when the universe was about 380,000 years old. The expanding cosmos had cooled enough for free electrons and nuclei to combine to form neutral atoms, mainly hydrogen. Photons, which until then had been continually scattered by the free electrons, were suddenly able to zip away unhindered, and it is this radiation - since stretched to microwave wavelengths by the universe's expansion - that makes up the CMB. It is all around us, and constitutes about 1 per cent of the "noise" on untuned analogue TV screens.
.... WMAP has measured variations in the temperature of the CMB as small as a few microkelvin.... These so-called anisotropies are believed to be due to inflation, a process thought to have occurred just 10-34 seconds after the big bang, during which a speck about 10-20 times the size of a proton expanded to a mind-boggling size in a flash.

During inflation, quantum fluctuations in space-time were extended to cosmological scales: by the time the CMB was released, these fluctuations had led to variations in the distribution of matter across the universe. Denser regions of the universe produced CMB photons slightly colder than average, and vice versa.

There is a chance that this will even give us a means of testing string theory.

That's 10 to the minus 34, and ten to the minus 20. Should be in superscript.