3.6. Further remarks

Inflation provides the first known mechanism for producing the flat, slightly perturbed initial conditions of the SBB. Despite the fact that there are many deep questions about inflation that have yet to be answered, it is still tremendous progress to know that nature has a way around the cosmological problems posed in Section 2. Whether nature has chosen this route is another question. Fortunately, inflation offers us a number of observational signatures that can help give an answer. These signatures are the subject of Sections 4 and 5.