OK, a lot of this stuff I know, but I want to be super clear on one point:
You are saying that points on opposite sides of the “grapefruit”-sized universe ended up traveling from each other at a speed of almost four times the speed of light, and that this was possible because they didn’t need to accelerate to that speed through the expenditure of force, nor did they move THROUGH space, but rather the space they occupied merely expanded at that speed?
“Although the universe has been expanding since the initial Big Bang, inflation refers to the hypothesis that, for a very short time, the universe expanded at a sharply INCREASED rate, rather than at the decreasing rate it followed before inflation and has followed since [until it, for some reason, several billion years later, apparently began accelerating again! -etl].
By some calculations, inflation increased the size of the universe by a factor of around 10^26 [10 followed by 26 zeros!-etl] during that tiny fraction of a second (far less than a trillionth of a second), expanding it from [way] smaller than the size of a proton to about the size of a grapefruit.”
https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_inflation.html
“According to the theory of inflation, the Universe grew by a factor of 10 to the sixtieth power in less than 10 to the negative thirty seconds.
So the “edges” of the Universe were expanding away from each other faster than the speed of light”
https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_inflation.html
-snip-
Inflation was proposed more than 35 years ago, among others, by Paul Steinhardt.
But Steinhardt has become one of the theory’s most fervent critics.
In a recent article in Scientific American, Steinhardt together with Anna Ijjas and Avi Loeb, don’t hold back.
Most cosmologists, they claim, are uncritical believers:
“The cosmology community has not taken a cold, honest look at the big bang inflationary theory or paid significant attention to critics who question whether inflation happened.
Rather cosmologists appear to accept at face value the proponents’ assertion that we must believe the inflationary theory because it offers the only simple explanation of the observed features of the universe.”
And it’s even worse, they argue, inflation is not even a scientific theory:
“Inflationary cosmology, as we currently understand it, cannot be evaluated using the scientific method.”