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"for the most part the fundamental laws of physics don't distinguish between past and future. They're time-symmetric," Carroll said.
But there's a problem with that scenario: a "skeleton in the closet," Carroll said. To begin inflation, the universe would have encompassed a microscopically tiny patch in an extremely unlikely configuration, not what scientists would expect from a randomly chosen initial condition.
"The conditions necessary for inflation are not that easy to start," Carroll said. "There's an argument that it's easier just to have our universe appear from a random fluctuation than to have inflation begin from a random fluctuation."
Carroll and Chen's scenario of infinite entropy is inspired by the finding in 1998 that the universe will expand forever because of a mysterious force called "dark energy." Under these conditions, the natural configuration of the universe is one that is almost empty. "In our current universe, the entropy is growing and the universe is expanding and becoming emptier," Carroll said.

But even empty space has faint traces of energy that fluctuate on the subatomic scale. As suggested previously by Jaume Garriga of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University, these flucuations can generate their own big bangs in tiny areas of the universe, widely separated in time and space. Carroll and Chen extend this idea in dramatic fashion, suggesting that inflation could start "in reverse" in the distant past of our universe, so that time could appear to run backwards (from our perspective) to observers far in our past.

I'm supposed to take any of this seriously?

Time runs both forwards and backwards at the same time, while it also doesn't run at all and stands still. The Universe was created at the time of the Big Bang but is continuously experiencing little "Big Bangs" at the same time, which is flowing both forwards and backwards at the same "time" while also standing still.

"Dark energy" is all around us but undetectible except for theory. Since our theories can't be wrong it must exist and we just have to find it. That will explain why the Universe is expanding in a fashion that we can't explain and how time runs both forwards and backwards at the same time.

I'm going back to be now, my dreams have more coherence than this.