Prospects of Inflationary Cosmology

In this review I briefly describe the evolution of the inflationary theory from the scenario based on the idea of supercooling and expansion in the false vacuum toward the theory of eternally expanding self-reproducing inflationary universe. I describe recent development of inflationary cosmology with Ω 6= 1, and then discuss some issues related to the possibility to verify inflation by comparing its predictions with observational data. I argue that it is possible to verify and disprove many particular models of inflationary cosmology, but it is very difficult to kill the basic idea of inflation. It seems that the best (and may be even the only) way to do so is to suggest a better cosmological theory. Round Table Discussion at the conference “Critical Dialogues in Cosmology,” Princeton, May 1996