" lambda-cold-dark-matter”. This says that spacetime is flat, that about 5 per cent of the mass of the Universe is in the form of baryons (including bright stars and gas and dust), some 27 per cent is in the form of cold dark matter, and 68 per cent is in the form of the lambda field, also known as dark energy. This confirmation that the Universe is flat was the clinching evidence that some form of inflation is the key to understanding the origin of the Big Bang. But by the end of the 1990s, the inflationary scenario had gone through several stages of development, and related ideas were around even before Guth coined the name.    What is now recognised as the first inflationary model was developed by Alexei Starobinsky, at the L. D. Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics in Moscow, at the end of the 1970s — but it was not then called “inflation”. It was a very complicated model based on a quantum theory of gravity, but it caused a sensation among cosmologists in what was then the Soviet Union, becoming known as the “Starobinsky model” of the Universe. Unfortunately, because of the difficulties Soviet scientists still had in travelling abroad or "

― John Gribbin , Before the Big Bang