Does this make sense?

Hmmmmm ......

Cosmology prior to the addition of 'inflation' theory had the issue ( amongst others ) of needing to be have pretty exact initial conditions ( at time 'zero' ) such that progression with time, the 'Bang', would lead to today's universe. Hawking and others looked at alternative scenarios of different initial states and found that uniformity in certain parameters would be required to an extra-ordinary degree ( to 1 part in a much larger number with powers of ten to many, many zeroes ) for that evolution to yield even universes vaguely similiar to ours.

This was a discomfort ....

It was found that if you kick in an exponential expansion ( inflation ) earlier on then alot important stuff ( like total energy density ) 'flatten' out to 'reasonable' values for a universe that contains us. This is the anthropic wedge. So a whole raft of alternative outcomes, many pretty radical or unimaginable, get nailed by this process.

However this puts a 'veil' on matters, as now a vast manifold of choices of starting circumstances are currently indistinguishable - and the theory of inflation guarantees this by it's design. We will never know the pre-inflation state, because inflation wiped out any imprint. So if I have some early universal state which would have, because of a dime's worth, otherwise flown off into some horrible place ( without us ) - I can simply veto that by firing up inflation at some appropriate time ( the exact moment depends on what level of variance I want to suppress ).

My cynicism is in that the declaration of

- some exact initial conditions + a 'normal bang' evolution

has been replaced by

- any old initial conditions + a process that makes initial conditions pretty irrelevant + a 'normal bang' evolution

Have we not simply 'dereferenced' our complexity here? And when will we ever have a test/control on this?

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) I forgot to emphasize .... I'll never know exactly what the right time was for that dimes worth to be supressed by inflation because of the veil that inflation brings!! Ditto for any other 'whatever's-worth' - all I can fairly confidently say is that it wont be the same time as the dime ....... sigh

( edit ) And I think I've been guilty of sloppy language myself in this thread. I'd point out that an exponential rate of increase in the size of the universe can lead to an exponential decrease in other things that depend on some inverse power of that size. Hence the flattening or supression. For those of you more familiar with maths, I'll point out that if you have some power law - that is some_variable to some_fixed_power then I'll always beat it with an exponential. Exponential always beats a polynomial ( eventually ) - which is why the power series expansion of an exponential is an infinite sum of polynomial terms. This is why exponential change is a real 'transformer'.
Tis my bedtime now ..... :-(

You're fine!
The neat thing about energy is that you can never lose it. But it changes form and there are quite a few of those.
The really neat thing is that energy is sort of 'designed' to be that way. It's a derived quantity, meaning that you have to calculate it from some other more direct thing like a time or a distance measurement(s). The Conservation of Energy is an incredibly useful principle, neatly unifying and bridging alot of otherwise apparently disparate stuff(s). But the secret is that forms of energy are defined in such a way to make that idea be true. In any new area of physics, new forces, new phenomena etc ....... new energies arise. It's basically due to one particular way of defining energy :

work = force * distance

So as something goes from A to B ( a distance ) under a force influence then energy has been exchanged in some manner. ( This can be expressed more precisely as an integral along a path ).

In fact Einstein never wrote E = m*c^2 ( in the published sense ). He was discussing the momentum of light and the reaction of a material body upon the emission of a photon and concluded that said body had lost an amount of mass = E/(c^2). Couple that in with the Special and General Relativistics corrections to dynamics ( masses varying with velocity for instance, or a gravity well robbing a photon of frequency due to time distortion ) and it all comes out in the wash.

It's not that energy conservation is a cheat in any way. It is real - try telling the people of Hiroshima/Nagasaki that it's 'just derived'. Other good conservatives are momemtum, angular momentum, charge, some ( combinations of ) symmetries ......

Cheers, Mike.

You have to be careful with your terms, as Mike as pointed out (and given us an example to boot!) - too many folk like to toss round 'pure energy', as if it means anything - but pair production is as good an example of 'energy into matter' as any. A gamma ray photon, with enough energy, collides with something (what? it doesn't matter for the telling of this story), and an electron and positron go shooting off (or, if higher energy, pion + anti-pion, or proton + anti-proton, ...).

At a much grander scale, there are many nuclear reactions at the heart of a very massive star which has a lot of 'iron' at its core, which are 'endothermic' (they consume energy, vs 'exothermic' reactions, the kind which power most stars most of the time) ... the net is that iron nuclei get turned (back) into helium, via an infusion of energy. The result? Core collapse, which leads to a Type II supernova.

(Mike will, no doubt, jump in and tidy up the sloppiness of the above ... one should be pedantic about this stuff - too easy to misunderstand - so the details really do matter).