“Inflation is the most compelling explanation for why our universe looks the

way it does and where the structure came from,” says Marilena Loverde, a
physicist at Stony Brook University. Inflation explains how, in a sense, we got
everything in the universe from nothing. The theory says that the early
universe went through a phase of extreme expansion. The process magnified
random blips in the quantum vacuum and converted them into the galaxies
and other stuff around us.

Theorists have had difficulty, though, showing how, or if, inflation works in
string theory. The most promising road to doing so—the so-called KKLT
construction—does not convince everyone. “It depends who you ask,” says
Suddhasattwa Brahma, a cosmologist at McGill University. “It has been a
lingering doubt in the back of the minds of many in string theory: Does it
really work?”

In 2018 a group of string theorists took a series of suggestive results and

argued that this difficulty reflected an impossibility—that perhaps inflation
just cannot happen in the theory. This so-called de Sitter swampland
conjecture claimed that any version of the concept that could describe de
Sitter space—a term for the kind of universe in which we expect inflation to
take place—would have some kind of technical flaw that put it in a
“swampland” of rejected theories.

No one has proved the swampland conjecture, and several string theorists still
expect that the final form of the theory will have no problem with inflation.
But many believe that although the conjecture might not hold up rigidly,
something close to it will. Brahma hopes to refine the swampland conjecture
to something that would not bar inflation entirely. “Maybe there can be
inflation,” he says. “But it has to be a very short period of inflation.”

Any limit on inflation would raise the prospect of testing string theory against
actual data, but a definite test requires a proof of the conjecture. According to
Cumrun Vafa, a physicist at Harvard University and one of the swampland
conjecture’s authors, researchers can start to build a case for the idea if they
can connect it to trusted physical laws. “There are two levels of it,” he says.
“First is being more confident in the principle. And then there’s explaining it.”