ABSTRACT
Initially, the book was conceived as a collection of Zeldovich’s lectures for fourthand fifth-year undergraduate students in the physics department of Moscow State University. The course was not long, only six months, and was dedicated to the new cosmology theory-the inflationary universe. The appearance of the term ‘inflation theory’ dates from January 15, 1981. It is a rare case in the history of science when the birth of a new field can be pinpointed with accuracy to within a day. This was the title of A.Guth’s paper in the Physical Review. YaB immediately realized the fundamental value of this direction for cosmology as a whole, and the possibility of now constructing a unified cosmological picture-from the singularity to our time-and actively developed the ideas of inflation further (I would like to note here that many of the principal ideas of inflationary cosmology had been expressed by YaB and his students before the work of Guth; acknowledgement of this fact is provided by the abundant citations of YaB’s papers in both the first, pioneering, paper of Guth and in numerous subsequent articles on inflation theory). Therefore, YaB considered it necessary as early as one year after the appearance of the theory to begin to give student lectures laying out the theory’s main ideas and results.
