Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

After reviewing the initial patch problem for inflation, I present numerical and analytical results that allow us to investigate arbitrarily inhomogenous spacetimes, and that show that this problem is non-existent: non-trivial mathematical reasons imply that for most of the topologies of the spacial slices, and for an O(1) fraction of the initial conditions, the spacetime approaches an inflationary one.