Summary; Inflation and Traditions of Research

One way to judge the impact of the inflation concept is to consider where cosmology might be today without it. The Einstein-de Sitter model would not have been so keenly defended, and there might have been more interest in negative space curvature, but the observations would have driven us to about where we are. We would have had much the same ideas about structure formation, but they would have been considered incomplete because the initial conditions would have to be invoked ad hoc. And there would not have been the exciting sense in the community that we might be approaching the end game. Whether or not it is true it certainly has been an important factor in the present high level of activity in cosmology.