Originally Posted by Cougar

Well, Guth's free lunch was the balance between gravitational potential and the total mass energy, I believe, but inflation had a definite cause in the very early cosmic evolution.



It's an attempted description of dark energy, how it acts, where it comes from....



Quite. It's an idea in development....

It does seem to be a residual "energetic space" effect from the brief period of exceedingly high expansion that Guth and others developed. That inflation only occurred due to the extreme conditions of a spacetime very different than ours! But it may have left over this tiny expansion effect...