Entropy Production, Phase Transitions and Inflation in the Early Universe: A Personal Perspective

I will give a summary of my personal attempts to address (and resolve) some of the outstanding cosmological problems namely that of the photon to baryon ratio and the horizon problem in terms of phase transitions in the early universe. As is well known, these have led to the successful "slow-roll" inflationary paradigm, which has illuminated and then exorcised all fine tuning associated with the dynamics of the early universe, only to be phased with the fine tuning demanded by the presence of the cosmological constant. While all appears great with our understanding of the universe and its evolution from its earliest stages to the present (with the minor issues of the origin of the cosmological constant and the Multiverse still beckoning), some astrophysical facts indicate the presence of physics that, in my opinion, have been tacitly ignored; most apparent of these the presence of a characteristic universal acceleration in the data. I will present an outline of conformal gravity that does provide such an acceleration and also a heuristic example of how/why such an acceleration ought to be considered more seriously.