Thank you, Steve Limpus and Vanamonde, for your comments. My responses follow:

I'm new to the Forum in the sense that until a few days ago, it had been a number of years since I'd even looked at it, much less contributed to it. Only a few minutes ago, I suddenly discovered that "threads" can be multipage. Steve Limpus, I discovered only a few minutes ago that my attempt to respond to your message at the end of Page 1 actually did get into the thread, but at the beginning of Page 2 instead of the end of Page 1. And, Vanamode, I had noticed that you were the last to enter a message but I was mystified by my failure to find any evidence of it.

Vanamonde, I deduce from your pseudonym that you are or have been a fan of Arthur C. Clarke, who died a day or so ago. I, too, have been an Arthur C. Clarke fan, having first encountered him in 1936 while a freshman in high school, having just read his "Against the Fall of Night", later revised as "The City and the Stars.

About your remark on inflation, I agree that it seems contrived. Yet, it's the most plausible explanation we've found thus far for the homogeneity in the distribution of matter throughout the observable universe. Inflation is thought of as a response to a phase change in the nature of space itself when in a metastable state, somewhat analogous to what has been known to happen to water in a glass beaker in a microwave oven: If the beaker is so smooth and clean that the water can find no nucleation sites, the water can be heated to well above the boiling point without coming to a boil. Then any slight disturbance such as dipping a spoon into it can cause the water to suddenly change into steam, with unpleasant consequences to the holder of the spoon. If space itself can harbor dark energy, maybe it can also undergo a phase change that would trigger a superluminal expansion. I'm still waiting for a more plausible explanation.

Steve Limpus, I'm not ready to say I enjoyed the links you gave me. It's going to require a sizable mouthful to chew on, and I'm still chewing on it, not yet sure whether to swallow it or spit it out. At the very least, it's going to require more chewing before I dare try to swallow it. From the density of the stuff, I suspect that you're more into cosmology than I am. I'm a physicist with a long-term interest in cosmology, but pedestrian rather than professional. I've been through the "derivation" of the field equations of general relativity and am conversant with the Schwarzschild solution. I say "derivation" because it merely assumes a relation between the Riemann-Cristoffel curvature tensor and the stress-energy tensor that, fortunately for him, happens to make verifiable predictions.