title: Lotus Sutra

text: Western interest in the "Lotus Sūtra" waned in the latter 19th century as Indo-centric scholars focused on older Pali and Sanskrit texts. However, Christian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, based predominantly in China, became interested in Kumārajīva's translation of the "Lotus Sūtra". These scholars attempted to draw parallels between the Old and New Testaments to earlier Nikaya sutras and the "Lotus Sutra". Abbreviated and "Christianized" translations were published by Richard and Soothill.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: After the Second World War, scholarly attention to the "Lotus Sūtra" was inspired by renewed interest in Japanese Buddhism as well as archeological research in Dunhuang in Gansu, China. In 1976, Leon Hurvitz published "The Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma," a scholarly English translation of the "Lotus Sūtra" based on Kumarajiva's Chinese. Whereas the Hurvitz work was independent scholarship, other modern translations were sponsored by Japanese Buddhist institutions. For example the 1975 Bunno Kato and Yoshiro Tamura translation of the "Threefold Lotus Sutra" was promoted by Rissho-kosei-kai, the Burton Watson translation was backed by Soka Gakkai and the Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama translation was sponsored by Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai ("Society for the Promotion of Buddhism").


title: Lotus Sutra

text: Translations into French, Spanish and German are also based on Kumarajiva's Chinese text. Each of these translations incorporate different approaches and styles that range from complex to simplified.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: According to Gene Reeves, "the "Lotus Sūtra" frequently advocates concrete practices, which are often related to the sutra itself. They are often given as sets of four to six practices, but include receiving and embracing the sutra, hearing it, reading and reciting it, remembering it correctly, copying it, explaining it, understanding its meaning, pondering it, proclaiming it, practicing as it teaches, honoring it, protecting it, making offerings to it, preaching it and teaching it to others, and leading others to do any of these things." The Sūtra also promotes the building of stūpas wherever the "Lotus Sūtra" is being preached.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: The "Lotus Sūtra" also mentions the six paramitas and the eightfold path. Other passages from the sutra have been seen as promoting certain ways of living. For example the story of Never Disrespectful Bodhisattva in chapter 20 has been seen by some as teaching that we should see all beings as potential Buddhas and treat them accordingly. Similarly, other parts of the sutra have been interpreted as exhortations to share the Dharma of the "Lotus" with other people.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: The sūtra became an extremely important text for religious practice in East Asian Buddhism, especially through ritualized devotional practice. A particularly important set of practices are the "five practices of the preacher of the dharma" (found in Chapter 19), which are preserving (or "upholding"), reading, reciting, explaining, and copying the sūtra.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: According to Daniel Stevenson, "upholding the sutra," "does not connote a specific regimen of practice but functions as a generic designation for "Lotus Sūtra" devotion in all its guises, above all devotion that is focused and sustained." Thus, it is a general term for enthusiastic embrace of the sutra. The term derived from the Sanskrit root "dhr," related to dharani and could refer to the memorization and retention of the teaching as well as to the more abstract "apprehension" of the Dharma in meditative states of samadhi. It could also refer to the storing, enshrining and safekeeping of the physical copies of the sutra.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: It was said that these practices were very meritorious and could lead to miracles. Stories dealing with "Lotus Sūtra" miracles, such as Huixiang's "Accounts of the Propagation of the Lotus Sūtra" (c. 7th century) became a popular genre in China and Japan. The popularity of these practices can be seen from the fact that a thousand copies of the text were sealed in the Dunhuang caves in the 11th century. The "Lotus Sūtra" was also one of the most widely memorized Buddhist texts, a practice which became a requirement for Buddhist monastic ordination at various points throughout Chinese history.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: These practices were often sponsored by Asian states as a way to protect the nation but they were also carried out by people from all social classes. Ritualized recitation, copying of the text and lectures explaining the Lotus Sūtra were performed at temples, shrines, and private residences. It was believed that these practices generated many benefits, from spiritual benefits like visions of Buddhas, rebirth in a pure land, awakening, and helping deceased relatives, to worldly benefits like peace, healing and protection from harm. In a similar fashion, the creation of different forms of visual, plastic, calligraphic, performance arts based on the "Lotus Sūtra" also came to be seen as a form of spiritual practice and a skillful means. The production of these works, which included "Lotus Sūtra" manuscripts themselves, could become highly ritualized processes. Likewise, the telling of miracle stories and composition of literature based on the Lotus Sūtra was also seen as another way to practice its teachings.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: In China, the practice extracted from chapter 20 of seeing all beings as Buddhas or "universal veneration" (pujing 普敬) was adopted as the main practice of Xinxing (540–594) "Three Stages Movement". Meanwhile, the self immolation of bodhisattva Medicine King inspired a controversial tradition of cremating parts of one's body as a kind of devotion. Chapter 25 has also been very influential on Asian Guanyin (觀音) devotionalism.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: The chanting of the "Lotus" was and remains widely practiced in Chinese Buddhism. It is often accompanied by the wooden fish instrument and preceded by various ritual acts, invocations, offerings and visualizations. The works of the Tiantai master Zhiyi include various "Lotus Sūtra" based practices like the "Lotus samādhi" and the "Rite of Repentance for the Lotus Samādhi". Zhiyi was also said to have memorized the entire Threefold "Lotus Sūtra". Zongxiao (1151–1214) mentions a practice which consisted in performing one or three prostrations for every character of the sutra.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: In the Japanese Tendai school, the "Lotus Sūtra" is an important part of Taimitsu ("Tendai esotericism") where it is part of certain rituals, such as the "Lotus rite" ("Hokke ho"), "performed to eradicate sin, build merit, and realize awakening." According to Stone and Teiser, "the mandala used in this ritual depicts the two buddhas Sakyamuni and Many Jewels seated together in its central court, as they appeared in the jeweled stūpa of the "Lotus Sūtra.""


title: Lotus Sutra

text: In Nichiren Buddhism, the central practice is the recitation of the title of the "Lotus Sūtra", called the "daimoku." This formula is "Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō". Nichiren Buddhists believe that this phrase contains the meaning of the entire sutra and contains and supersedes all other Buddhist practices (which are seen as provisional and no longer effective). By chanting this phrase with faith, one is said to be able to achieve Buddhahood. Nichiren Buddhists often chant this phrase while facing a "great mandala" ("daimandara"), or "revered object of worship" ("gohonzon"), a practice that was promoted by Nichiren himself. Nichiren believed that chanting while contemplating the gohonzon allowed to enter the mandala of the Lotus assembly.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: The "Lotus Sūtra" has had a great impact on East Asian literature, art, and folklore for over 1400 years.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: Various events from the sutra are depicted in religious art. Wang argues that the explosion of art inspired by the "Lotus Sūtra", starting from the 7th and 8th centuries in China, was a confluence of text and the topography of the Chinese medieval mind in which the latter dominated.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: Motifs from the "Lotus Sūtra" figure prominently in the Dunhuang caves built in the Sui era. In the fifth century, the scene of Shakyamuni and Prabhutaratna Buddhas seated together as depicted in the 11th chapter of the "Lotus Sūtra" became arguably the most popular theme in Chinese Buddhist art. Examples can be seen in a bronze plaque (year 686) at Hase-dera Temple in Japan and, in Korea, at Dabotap and Seokgatap Pagodas, built in 751, at Bulguksa Temple.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: Tamura refers to the ""Lotus Sūtra" literary genre." Its ideas and images are writ large in great works of Chinese and Japanese literature such as "The Dream of the Red Chamber" and "The Tale of Genji". The "Lotus Sūtra" has had an outsized influence on Japanese Buddhist poetry. Far more poems have been "Lotus Sūtra"-inspired than other sutras. In the work "Kanwa taisho myoho renge-kyo", a compendium of more than 120 collections of poetry from the Heian period, there are more than 1360 poems with references to the "Lotus Sūtra" in just their titles.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: According to Gene Reeves, "Japan's greatest twentieth-century storyteller and poet, Kenji Miyazawa, became devoted to the "Lotus Sūtra", writing to his father on his own deathbed that all he ever wanted to do was share the teachings of this sutra with others." Miyazawa implicitly references the sutra in his writings.


title: Lotus Sutra

text: According to Jacqueline Stone and Stephen Teiser "the Noh drama and other forms of medieval Japanese literature interpreted Chapter 5, "Medicinal Herbs", as teaching the potential for buddhahood in grasses and trees ("sōmoku jōbutsu")."


title: Lotus Sutra

text: The "Lotus Sūtra" has inspired a branch of folklore based on figures in the sutra or subsequent people who have embraced it. The story of the Dragon King's daughter, who attained enlightenment in the 12th (Devadatta) chapter of the "Lotus Sūtra", appears in the "Complete Tale of Avalokiteśvara and the Southern Seas" and the "Precious Scroll of Sudhana and Longnü" folkstories. The "Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sutra" is a collection of 129 stories with folklore motifs based on "Buddhist pseudo-biographies."


title: Al Lettieri

text: Alfredo Lettieri (February 24, 1928 – October 18, 1975) was an American actor. Active during the 1960s and 70s, he commonly portrayed villainous characters. He achieved recognition for his performance as mobster Virgil Sollozzo in the crime film "The Godfather" (1972) and appeared in several other productions alongside Hollywood's biggest screen stars.


title: Al Lettieri

text: Lettieri was an Italian-American who spoke Italian fluently. His brother-in-law was Pasquale Eboli, brother of Genovese crime family boss Thomas Eboli.


title: Al Lettieri

text: Lettieri had a role in the 1958 "Perry Mason" episode "The Case of the Fugitive Nurse" as Arthur Strome. At the age of 36, he had a role in the television film "The Hanged Man" (1964).


title: Al Lettieri

text: Lettieri is best known for his role as Sicilian heroin trafficker Virgil Sollozzo in the 1972 American crime film "The Godfather". This was the second film in which he and Marlon Brando had worked together, the first being "The Night of the Following Day" (1969).


title: Al Lettieri

text: He wrote the film adaptation that became the screenplay for the 1971 gangster movie "Villain", which starred Richard Burton and Ian McShane. Lettieri played the henchman, Rudy Butler, in Steve McQueen's 1972 action film, "The Getaway", and the menacing hit-man Frank Renda in the 1974 Charles Bronson film, "Mr. Majestyk". He played the part of Ciro Musante in the Tonino Valerii-directed 1976 film, "Go Gorilla Go".


title: All That Remains (band)

text: All That Remains is an American heavy metal band from Springfield, Massachusetts, formed in 1998. They have released nine studio albums, a , and have sold over a million records worldwide. The group currently consists of vocalist Philip Labonte, rhythm guitarist Mike Martin, former Diecast drummer Jason Costa, and lead guitarist Jason Richardson, with Labonte being the last remaining original member. In spite of this, the band's line-up had remained consistent from the release of 2008's "Overcome" until 2015's "The Order of Things", spanning four albums. This line-up changed, however, in September 2015, when long-time bassist Jeanne Sagan left the band, with Patrick taking her place, and then again in February 2019, when the band confirmed that Jason Richardson would be joining the band to replace the deceased lead guitarist and original member, Oli Herbert. In 2021, Aaron Patrick parted ways with All That Remains to focus on his other band, Bury Your Dead.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: Phil Labonte, the vocalist for All That Remains, was originally the vocalist for Shadows Fall and appeared on the cult classic album "Somber Eyes to the Sky". After being asked to leave because of "musical differences", Phil focused entirely on All That Remains, a side project he had been working on prior to leaving. The band released their debut album, "Behind Silence and Solitude", on March 26, 2002, through Prosthetic Records. The style of the album differs from their current melodic metalcore musical style they have had since 2006, and more prominently contains elements of melodic death metal. It was also the band's only release featuring the original members Chris Bartlett and Dan Egan.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: Their second album, "This Darkened Heart", was released on March 23, 2004, through Prosthetic Records. Produced by Killswitch Engage guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz, the album featured better production compared to its predecessor. The three singles that were released from the album are "This Darkened Heart", "Tattered on My Sleeve", and "The Deepest Gray". Music videos were created for all three. "This Darkened Heart" is the first album with current guitarist Mike Martin.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: Their third album, "The Fall of Ideals", was released on July 11, 2006, through Prosthetic Records. Once again, the album was produced by Adam Dutkiewicz. The album is also considered to be the band's breakthrough release, as it entered the "Billboard" 200 charts at number 75, selling almost 13,000 copies in its first week. "This Calling" was released as the album's first single. Two music videos were created, with one incorporating footage from "Saw III" (as it was the lead song from the film's soundtrack). A music video was made for the album's second single "The Air That I Breathe". The band was also a part of Ozzfest 2006. The song "Six" is featured in Guitar Hero II as an unlockable song . On June 20, 2007, it was announced that "The Fall of Ideals" had surpassed 100,000 sales in the United States. A music video for the album's third single "Not Alone" was filmed on July 4 and was released on September 10, 2007. In 2007, they played at Wacken Open Air in Wacken, Germany, to great success. On November 30, 2007, All That Remains released a live CD/DVD album titled "All That Remains Live".


title: All That Remains (band)

text: In early 2008, they embarked on a headlining tour with support from Chimaira and Black Tide with Divine Heresy and Light This City splitting the tour's opening slot. Five Finger Death Punch was originally supposed to play but dropped off before the tour started due to vocal problems. Later that summer All That Remains appeared on the Midwestern leg of Van's Warped Tour 2008. The band visited Audiohammer Studios in May 2008 to record their fourth studio album, entitled "Overcome", with producer Jason Suecof. The album was released on September 16, 2008, with critics giving it mixed reviews due to its more mainstream sound, many claiming that the band had focused on catchy melodies rather than technical heavy-metal riffs. The song "Chiron" was released as the first single from the album and a video was produced for it. Two singles from the album",Chiron" and "Two Weeks", were also released for Rock Band as downloadable content, along with "This Calling". The band released a video for "Two Weeks" in October. "Two Weeks" was also featured as a free playable download on the popular iPhone OS game "Tap Tap Revenge 2". On June 10, All That Remains started touring on the Rockstar Mayhem Festival, playing the Jägermeister stage along with God Forbid and headliners Trivium.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: In April 2009, Phil Labonte posted on his Twitter that he was recording something in the studio on that same day with (at least) Oli and Mike. This turned out to be the acoustic version of "Forever in Your Hands". In late June 2009, drummer Jason Costa broke his hand, so the band temporarily recruited drummer Tony Laureano (Dimmu Borgir, Nile) to honor their commitment to the 2009 Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: All That Remains announced plans to start recording another album, which began in April 2010. The band later confirmed the album would be released later in the year with Adam Dutkiewicz as the chosen producer. The album was released on October 12, 2010. In late September 2010, All That Remains announced "The Napalm & Noise Tour", which took place from November 23, 2013, to December 21, 2013. They co-headlined it with The Devil Wears Prada, and were supported by Story of the Year and Haste the Day. In October, All That Remains released the music video for their single "Forever in Your Hands". Also released on this day was a free download of the Japanese bonus track "Frozen" from Overcome. In January 2011, All That Remains won top honors in the Hard Rock/Metal category in the 9th Annual Independent Music Awards for the album.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: On June 8, 2010, All That Remains premiered the title track "For We Are Many" during a show in Burlington, Vermont, under the working title of "Dem Trims". From August 18 to September 6, a free download of the title track, "For We Are Many", was available on the band's website after subscribing to their mailing list. On October 6, 2010, All That Remains released a music video for the single "Hold On". "For We Are Many" debuted at number 10 on the Billboard 200, selling a little over 29,000 copies in its first week. All That Remains took part in the Share the Welt Fall tour with Hatebreed, Rains, and Five Finger Death Punch.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: On January 25, 2012, Phil Labonte stated that the band was working on new material. On June 21, they revealed that their upcoming sixth studio album is titled "A War You Cannot Win". On August 13, 2012, Phil uploaded "Down Through the Ages" to YouTube. All That Remains released the album cover to the album August 23. On August 27, the first single "Stand Up" was released on the radio. On August 29, All That Remains released the official lyric video to "Stand Up". The band has also released a free track of "Down Through the Ages" on their website from the album "A War You Cannot Win", which was released on November 6, 2012. On October 21, 2013, the band released a music video for the track "What If I Was Nothing".


title: All That Remains (band)

text: In January 2014, the band reported through their official Facebook page that they had started writing their seventh studio album. On June 26, 2014, it was confirmed that the band was in pre-production on their new album with producer Josh Wilbur, who had previously worked with Lamb of God and Gojira. The follow-up to 2012's "A War You Cannot Win" was tentatively due before the end of the year. However, during an interview with Phil Labonte on the Jasta Show, Phil stated that the new forthcoming record would more than likely be released in January.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: On November 14, 2014, Phil Labonte announced that he released a new song from the new album. The song ended up being entitled "No Knock", which was released officially in digital stores on November 24, 2014. On November 20, Phil Labonte announced via Facebook that the new album title is "The Order of Things". The album was released on February 24, 2015, via Razor & Tie, after the first single from the album, "This Probably Won't End Well", was released on January 13, 2015.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: On September 24, 2015, the band announced the departure of Jeanne Sagan and the introduction of her replacement on bass, Aaron Patrick, formerly of Bury Your Dead and Devildriver.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: On August 1, it was reported that All That Remains were recording their eighth album at a Los Angeles-area studio with producer Howard Benson. Frontman Phil Labonte stated about the follow-up to 2015's "The Order of Things": "The disc we are working on right now is going to blow people's minds. It's gonna challenge you. There are songs like nothing we've ever done before." The new album, officially been titled "Madness", was released on April 28, 2017. The band toured North America with Alter Bridge in support of the album in late 2017.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: On September 14, 2018, the band released a new song titled "Fuck Love" from their upcoming studio album set for release in early 2019. On September 26, the band released an image of the cover art to their social media pages, revealing the title of the new record to be "Victim of the New Disease".


title: All That Remains (band)

text: On October 17, 2018, the band revealed through their Facebook page that lead guitarist and founding member Oli Herbert had died at the age of 44. On Facebook, his wife claimed to have received the toxicology report, which indicated that the cause of his death was drowning after taking antidepressants and sleeping aids, neither of which were prescribed. However, it has been reported that police are looking into his death and that it was possibly the result of foul play. The Facebook post has since been deleted. The investigation is ongoing.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: On November 9, 2018, Labonte revealed in an interview that Jason Richardson (formerly of Chelsea Grin and Born of Osiris) would be filling in as lead guitarist for their upcoming tours.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: On February 5, 2019, the band confirmed that Richardson would be joining the band as an official member via their Facebook page.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: All That Remains has been described as metalcore, hard rock, melodic death metal, and heavy metal. All That Remains' music mixes "crushing" riffs, dual guitar harmonies, double bass drum patterns, and breakdowns that are prevalent in the metalcore genre. Vocally, the band combines singing, screaming, and growls. Phil Labonte's lyrics focus on themes such as relationships, personal struggles, society, and hope.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: The band's influences include In Flames, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Iron Maiden, Pantera, Soilwork, At The Gates, King Diamond, Killswitch Engage, Hatebreed, Cannibal Corpse, Carcass, Grave, Arch Enemy, Biohazard, Cave In, Coalesce, Agnostic Front, and Earth Crisis. Oli Herbert had stated his biggest influence on guitar was Andy LaRocque of King Diamond. Also, he mentioned he draws much influence from George Lynch, John Sykes, and Randy Rhoads. Mike Martin has mentioned on numerous occasions that one of his biggest influences is John Mayer.


title: All That Remains (band)

text: Phil Labonte has mentioned his influences range from Cannibal Corpse, Carcass, Grave, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Pantera, and even many 1980s hair metal bands. In an interview, Phil said: He mentioned via Twitter and Facebook that he is a huge fan of Bring Me the Horizon, and The Acacia Strain. He also is known for being a huge fan of non-metal acts such as Sarah McLachlan, Garth Brooks, Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Skrillex.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: Harmony of the Seas is an built by STX France at the Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard in Saint-Nazaire, France, for Royal Caribbean International. With a gross tonnage of 226,963 GT, she is the third largest passenger ship in the world, larger than her older sisters "Oasis of the Seas" and "Allure of the Seas", but surpassed by her newer sisters "Symphony of the Seas" and "Wonder of the Seas". In length, however, "Harmony of the Seas" is the longest cruise ship in the world.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: The success of the first two "Oasis"-class ships led Royal Caribbean Cruises to order a third ship of the type in December 2012. "Harmony of the Seas" is named after the "Harmony" module on the International Space Station . The vessel was floated out on 19 June 2015, began her first sea trials on 10 March 2016, and was delivered to Royal Caribbean on 12 May 2016. After a construction time of 32 months, the ship first set sail on 15 May 2016 from the STX France docks in Saint-Nazaire, viewed by some 70,000 people. Her first destination was Southampton, England, although her home port was Barcelona until 23 October 2016 when she crossed the Atlantic.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: "Harmony of the Seas" took two short "preview cruises", three nights to Cherbourg and four nights to Rotterdam, after reaching port in Southampton on 17 May. During these voyages, passengers complained of ongoing construction, a lack of hot water, unopened attractions, excessive waits at restaurants, and other issues. The ship's maiden voyage departed from Southampton on 29 May and arrived at its summer home port of Barcelona on 5 June. According to passengers on this cruise, construction had finished and the ship was ready to sail. For the inaugural season, "Harmony of the Seas" offered seven-night western Mediterranean cruises originating from Barcelona and Civitavecchia.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: On 10 November 2016, the vessel was officially christened by her godmother, Miami-Dade County teacher Brittany Affolter.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: "Harmony of the Seas" has 2,747 staterooms, of various sizes, to accommodate (at double occupancy) 5,479 guests. The ship is divided into seven neighborhoods, including Central Park and Boardwalk, like her "Oasis"-class sisters. "Harmony of the Seas" has a number of water-based attractions including a large dry slide complex, known as "The Ultimate Abyss", two surf simulators, three water slides, and 3 swimming pools. It also has the first water slides on a Royal Caribbean ship. She also has 20 dining venues, a 1,400-seat theatre and 11,252 works of art.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: "Harmony of the Seas" is 20 percent more energy efficient than her sister ships "Oasis of the Seas" and "Allure of the Seas". Small air bubbles from the keel reduce drag and thus fuel consumption by 7 to 8 percent, and a smooth hull surface further reduces resistance. The bubble system also reduces propeller noise, and is used on "Celebrity Reflection" and "Quantum of the Seas". LED and fluorescent lamps replace incandescent light bulbs, reducing power consumption and the need for air conditioning. The engine system uses a waste heat recovery system, and drives three Azipod propellers.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: On 13 September 2016, one employee was killed and four were injured when a lifeboat broke loose and dropped from the fifth deck during a security drill.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: On 25 December 2018, British crew member Arron Hough was reported missing by other crew members after failing to report to work. The United States Coast Guard suspended the search for the on-board entertainer on 27 December 2018, after stating that the ship had reported that a crew member had gone overboard.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: On 11 January 2019, a 16 year old was trying to enter his eighth-deck cabin through a nearby balcony when he slipped and fell to his death. The accident happened while the ship was docked in Labadee, a leased peninsula in Haiti. The ship's medical team performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but the boy had sustained major head trauma and died of his injuries.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: On 30 January 2022, "Harmony of the Seas" entered a temporary exclusion zone around Cape Canaveral, which caused the postponement of a planned launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket was able to successfully launch the following evening. A Coast Guard investigation found Royal Caribbean responsible for the incident, but also led to reforms in how the Coast Guard determines exclusion zones and disseminates that information to ships.


title: Harmony of the Seas

text: On 26 May 2022, the vessel collided with a jetty in Falmouth, Jamaica. The vessel suffered minimal damage, and was safely docked shortly afterwards. No injuries were reported.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from  seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity to some time between and  seconds after the singularity. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate. The acceleration of this expansion due to dark energy began after the universe was already over 7.7 billion years old (5.4 billion years ago).


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Inflation theory was developed in the late 1970s and early 80s, with notable contributions by several theoretical physicists, including Alexei Starobinsky at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Alan Guth at Cornell University, and Andrei Linde at Lebedev Physical Institute. Alexei Starobinsky, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde won the 2014 Kavli Prize "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation." It was developed further in the early 1980s. It explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified to cosmic size, become the seeds for the growth of structure in the Universe (see galaxy formation and evolution and structure formation). Many physicists also believe that inflation explains why the universe appears to be the same in all directions (isotropic), why the cosmic microwave background radiation is distributed evenly, why the universe is flat, and why no magnetic monopoles have been observed.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The detailed particle physics mechanism responsible for inflation is unknown. The basic inflationary paradigm is accepted by most physicists, as a number of inflation model predictions have been confirmed by observation;


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: however, a substantial minority of scientists dissent from this position. The hypothetical field thought to be responsible for inflation is called the inflaton.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In 2002 three of the original architects of the theory were recognized for their major contributions; physicists Alan Guth of M.I.T., Andrei Linde of Stanford, and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton shared the prestigious Dirac Prize "for development of the concept of inflation in cosmology". In 2012 Guth and Linde were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their invention and development of inflationary cosmology.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Around 1930, Edwin Hubble discovered that light from remote galaxies was redshifted; the more remote, the more shifted. This was quickly interpreted as meaning galaxies were receding from Earth. If Earth is not in some special, privileged, central position in the universe, then it would mean all galaxies are moving apart, and the further away, the faster they are moving away. It is now understood that the universe is expanding, carrying the galaxies with it, and causing this observation. Many other observations agree, and also lead to the same conclusion. However, for many years it was not clear why or how the universe might be expanding, or what it might signify.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Based on a huge amount of experimental observation and theoretical work, it is now believed that the reason for the observation is that "space itself is expanding", and that it expanded very rapidly within the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. This kind of expansion is known as a ""metric"" expansion. In the terminology of mathematics and physics, a "metric" is a measure of distance that satisfies a specific list of properties, and the term implies that "the sense of distance within the universe is itself changing". Today, metric variation is far too small an effect to see on less than an intergalactic scale.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The modern explanation for the metric expansion of space was proposed by physicist Alan Guth in 1979, while investigating the problem of why no magnetic monopoles are seen today. He found that if the universe contained a field in a positive-energy false vacuum state, then according to general relativity it would generate an exponential expansion of space. It was very quickly realized that such an expansion would resolve many other long-standing problems. These problems arise from the observation that to look like it does "today", the Universe would have to have started from very finely tuned, or "special" initial conditions at the Big Bang. Inflation theory largely resolves these problems as well, thus making a universe like ours much more likely in the context of Big Bang theory.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: No physical field has yet been discovered that is responsible for this inflation. However such a field would be scalar and the first relativistic scalar field proven to exist, the Higgs field, was only discovered in 2012–2013 and is still being researched. So it is not seen as problematic that a field responsible for cosmic inflation and the metric expansion of space has not yet been discovered. The proposed field and its quanta (the subatomic particles related to it) have been named the inflaton. If this field did not exist, scientists would have to propose a different explanation for all the observations that strongly suggest a metric expansion of space has occurred, and is still occurring (much more slowly) today.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: An expanding universe generally has a cosmological horizon, which, by analogy with the more familiar horizon caused by the curvature of Earth's surface, marks the boundary of the part of the Universe that an observer can see. Light (or other radiation) emitted by objects beyond the cosmological horizon in an accelerating universe never reaches the observer, because the space in between the observer and the object is expanding too rapidly.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The observable universe is one "causal patch" of a much larger unobservable universe; other parts of the Universe cannot communicate with Earth yet. These parts of the Universe are outside our current cosmological horizon. In the standard hot big bang model, without inflation, the cosmological horizon moves out, bringing new regions into view. Yet as a local observer sees such a region for the first time, it looks no different from any other region of space the local observer has already seen: its background radiation is at nearly the same temperature as the background radiation of other regions, and its space-time curvature is evolving lock-step with the others. This presents a mystery: how did these new regions know what temperature and curvature they were supposed to have? They couldn't have learned it by getting signals, because they were not previously in communication with our past light cone.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Inflation answers this question by postulating that all the regions come from an earlier era with a big vacuum energy, or cosmological constant. A space with a cosmological constant is qualitatively different: instead of moving outward, the cosmological horizon stays put. For any one observer, the distance to the cosmological horizon is constant. With exponentially expanding space, two nearby observers are separated very quickly; so much so, that the distance between them quickly exceeds the limits of communications. The spatial slices are expanding very fast to cover huge volumes. Things are constantly moving beyond the cosmological horizon, which is a fixed distance away, and everything becomes homogeneous.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: As the inflationary field slowly relaxes to the vacuum, the cosmological constant goes to zero and space begins to expand normally. The new regions that come into view during the normal expansion phase are exactly the same regions that were pushed out of the horizon during inflation, and so they are at nearly the same temperature and curvature, because they come from the same originally small patch of space.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The theory of inflation thus explains why the temperatures and curvatures of different regions are so nearly equal. It also predicts that the total curvature of a space-slice at constant global time is zero. This prediction implies that the total ordinary matter, dark matter and residual vacuum energy in the Universe have to add up to the critical density, and the evidence supports this. More strikingly, inflation allows physicists to calculate the minute differences in temperature of different regions from quantum fluctuations during the inflationary era, and many of these quantitative predictions have been confirmed.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In a space that expands exponentially (or nearly exponentially) with time, any pair of free-floating objects that are initially at rest will move apart from each other at an accelerating rate, at least as long as they are not bound together by any force. From the point of view of one such object, the spacetime is something like an inside-out Schwarzschild black hole—each object is surrounded by a spherical event horizon. Once the other object has fallen through this horizon it can never return, and even light signals it sends will never reach the first object (at least so long as the space continues to expand exponentially).


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In the approximation that the expansion is exactly exponential, the horizon is static and remains a fixed physical distance away. This patch of an inflating universe can be described by the following metric:


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: This exponentially expanding spacetime is called a de Sitter space, and to sustain it there must be a cosmological constant, a vacuum energy density that is constant in space and time and proportional to Λ in the above metric. For the case of exactly exponential expansion, the vacuum energy has a negative pressure "p" equal in magnitude to its energy density "ρ"; the equation of state is "p=−ρ".


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Inflation is typically not an exactly exponential expansion, but rather quasi- or near-exponential. In such a universe the horizon will slowly grow with time as the vacuum energy density gradually decreases.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Because the accelerating expansion of space stretches out any initial variations in density or temperature to very large length scales, an essential feature of inflation is that it smooths out inhomogeneities and anisotropies, and reduces the curvature of space. This pushes the Universe into a very simple state in which it is completely dominated by the inflaton field and the only significant inhomogeneities are tiny quantum fluctuations. Inflation also dilutes exotic heavy particles, such as the magnetic monopoles predicted by many extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics. If the Universe was only hot enough to form such particles "before" a period of inflation, they would not be observed in nature, as they would be so rare that it is quite likely that there are none in the observable universe. Together, these effects are called the inflationary "no-hair theorem" by analogy with the no hair theorem for black holes.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The "no-hair" theorem works essentially because the cosmological horizon is no different from a black-hole horizon, except for philosophical disagreements about what is on the other side. The interpretation of the no-hair theorem is that the Universe (observable and unobservable) expands by an enormous factor during inflation. In an expanding universe, energy densities generally fall, or get diluted, as the volume of the Universe increases. For example, the density of ordinary "cold" matter (dust) goes down as the inverse of the volume: when linear dimensions double, the energy density goes down by a factor of eight; the radiation energy density goes down even more rapidly as the Universe expands since the wavelength of each photon is stretched (redshifted), in addition to the photons being dispersed by the expansion. When linear dimensions are doubled, the energy density in radiation falls by a factor of sixteen (see the solution of the energy density continuity equation for an ultra-relativistic fluid). During inflation, the energy density in the inflaton field is roughly constant. However, the energy density in everything else, including inhomogeneities, curvature, anisotropies, exotic particles, and standard-model particles is falling, and through sufficient inflation these all become negligible. This leaves the Universe flat and symmetric, and (apart from the homogeneous inflaton field) mostly empty, at the moment inflation ends and reheating begins.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: A key requirement is that inflation must continue long enough to produce the present observable universe from a single, small inflationary Hubble volume. This is necessary to ensure that the Universe appears flat, homogeneous and isotropic at the largest observable scales. This requirement is generally thought to be satisfied if the Universe expanded by a factor of at least during inflation.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Inflation is a period of supercooled expansion, when the temperature drops by a factor of 100,000 or so. (The exact drop is model-dependent, but in the first models it was typically from  K down to  K.) This relatively low temperature is maintained during the inflationary phase. When inflation ends the temperature returns to the pre-inflationary temperature; this is called "reheating" or thermalization because the large potential energy of the inflaton field decays into particles and fills the Universe with Standard Model particles, including electromagnetic radiation, starting the radiation dominated phase of the Universe. Because the nature of the inflation is not known, this process is still poorly understood, although it is believed to take place through a parametric resonance.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Inflation resolves several problems in Big Bang cosmology that were discovered in the 1970s. Inflation was first proposed by Alan Guth in 1979 while investigating the problem of why no magnetic monopoles are seen today; he found that a positive-energy false vacuum would, according to general relativity, generate an exponential expansion of space. It was very quickly realised that such an expansion would resolve many other long-standing problems. These problems arise from the observation that to look like it does "today", the Universe would have to have started from very finely tuned, or "special" initial conditions at the Big Bang. Inflation attempts to resolve these problems by providing a dynamical mechanism that drives the Universe to this special state, thus making a universe like ours much more likely in the context of the Big Bang theory.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The horizon problem is the problem of determining why the Universe appears statistically homogeneous and isotropic in accordance with the cosmological principle. For example, molecules in a canister of gas are distributed homogeneously and isotropically because they are in thermal equilibrium: gas throughout the canister has had enough time to interact to dissipate inhomogeneities and anisotropies. The situation is quite different in the big bang model without inflation, because gravitational expansion does not give the early universe enough time to equilibrate. In a big bang with only the matter and radiation known in the Standard Model, two widely separated regions of the observable universe cannot have equilibrated because they move apart from each other faster than the speed of light and thus have never come into causal contact. In the early Universe, it was not possible to send a light signal between the two regions. Because they have had no interaction, it is difficult to explain why they have the same temperature (are thermally equilibrated). Historically, proposed solutions included the "Phoenix universe" of Georges Lemaître, the related oscillatory universe of Richard Chase Tolman, and the Mixmaster universe of Charles Misner. Lemaître and Tolman proposed that a universe undergoing a number of cycles of contraction and expansion could come into thermal equilibrium. Their models failed, however, because of the buildup of entropy over several cycles. Misner made the (ultimately incorrect) conjecture that the Mixmaster mechanism, which made the Universe "more" chaotic, could lead to statistical homogeneity and isotropy.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The flatness problem is sometimes called one of the Dicke coincidences (along with the cosmological constant problem).


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: It became known in the 1960s that the density of matter in the Universe was comparable to the critical density necessary for a flat universe (that is, a universe whose large scale geometry is the usual Euclidean geometry, rather than a non-Euclidean hyperbolic or spherical geometry).


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Therefore, regardless of the shape of the universe the contribution of spatial curvature to the expansion of the Universe could not be much greater than the contribution of matter. But as the Universe expands, the curvature redshifts away more slowly than matter and radiation. Extrapolated into the past, this presents a fine-tuning problem because the contribution of curvature to the Universe must be exponentially small (sixteen orders of magnitude less than the density of radiation at Big Bang nucleosynthesis, for example). This problem is exacerbated by recent observations of the cosmic microwave background that have demonstrated that the Universe is flat to within a few percent.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The magnetic monopole problem, sometimes called "the exotic-relics problem", says that if the early universe were very hot, a large number of very heavy, stable magnetic monopoles would have been produced.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Stable magnetic monopoles are a problem for Grand Unified Theories, which propose that at high temperatures (such as in the early universe) the electromagnetic force, strong, and weak nuclear forces are not actually fundamental forces but arise due to spontaneous symmetry breaking from a single gauge theory.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: These theories predict a number of heavy, stable particles that have not been observed in nature. The most notorious is the magnetic monopole, a kind of stable, heavy "charge" of magnetic field.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Monopoles are predicted to be copiously produced following Grand Unified Theories at high temperature,


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: and they should have persisted to the present day, to such an extent that they would become the primary constituent of the Universe.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Not only is that not the case, but all searches for them have failed, placing stringent limits on the density of relic magnetic monopoles in the Universe.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: A period of inflation that occurs below the temperature where magnetic monopoles can be produced would offer a possible resolution of this problem: Monopoles would be separated from each other as the Universe around them expands, potentially lowering their observed density by many orders of magnitude. Though, as cosmologist Martin Rees has written,


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In the early days of General Relativity, Albert Einstein introduced the cosmological constant to allow a static solution, which was a three-dimensional sphere with a uniform density of matter. Later, Willem de Sitter found a highly symmetric inflating universe, which described a universe with a cosmological constant that is otherwise empty.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: It was discovered that Einstein's universe is unstable, and that small fluctuations cause it to collapse or turn into a de Sitter universe.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In the early 1970s Zeldovich noticed the flatness and horizon problems of Big Bang cosmology; before his work, cosmology was presumed to be symmetrical on purely philosophical grounds. In the Soviet Union, this and other considerations led Belinski and Khalatnikov to analyze the chaotic BKL singularity in General Relativity. Misner's Mixmaster universe attempted to use this chaotic behavior to solve the cosmological problems, with limited success.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In the late 1970s, Sidney Coleman applied the instanton techniques developed by Alexander Polyakov and collaborators to study the fate of the false vacuum in quantum field theory. Like a metastable phase in statistical mechanics—water below the freezing temperature or above the boiling point—a quantum field would need to nucleate a large enough bubble of the new vacuum, the new phase, in order to make a transition. Coleman found the most likely decay pathway for vacuum decay and calculated the inverse lifetime per unit volume. He eventually noted that gravitational effects would be significant, but he did not calculate these effects and did not apply the results to cosmology.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The universe could have been spontaneously created from nothing (no space, time, nor matter) by quantum fluctuations of metastable false vacuum causing an expanding bubble of true vacuum.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In the Soviet Union, Alexei Starobinsky noted that quantum corrections to general relativity should be important for the early universe. These generically lead to curvature-squared corrections to the Einstein–Hilbert action and a form of "f"("R") modified gravity. The solution to Einstein's equations in the presence of curvature squared terms, when the curvatures are large, leads to an effective cosmological constant. Therefore, he proposed that the early universe went through an inflationary de Sitter era.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: This resolved the cosmology problems and led to specific predictions for the corrections to the microwave background radiation, corrections that were then calculated in detail. Starobinsky used the action


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In 1978, Zeldovich noted the monopole problem, which was an unambiguous quantitative version of the horizon problem, this time in a subfield of particle physics, which led to several speculative attempts to resolve it. In 1980 Alan Guth realized that false vacuum decay in the early universe would solve the problem, leading him to propose a scalar-driven inflation. Starobinsky's and Guth's scenarios both predicted an initial de Sitter phase, differing only in mechanistic details.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: it was Guth who coined the term "inflation". At the same time, Starobinsky argued that quantum corrections to gravity would replace the initial singularity of the Universe with an exponentially expanding de Sitter phase.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In October 1980, Demosthenes Kazanas suggested that exponential expansion could eliminate the particle horizon and perhaps solve the horizon problem,


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: while Sato suggested that an exponential expansion could eliminate domain walls (another kind of exotic relic). In 1981 Einhorn and Sato published a model similar to Guth's and showed that it would resolve the puzzle of the magnetic monopole abundance in Grand Unified Theories. Like Guth, they concluded that such a model not only required fine tuning of the cosmological constant, but also would likely lead to a much too granular universe, i.e., to large density variations resulting from bubble wall collisions.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Guth proposed that as the early universe cooled, it was trapped in a false vacuum with a high energy density, which is much like a cosmological constant. As the very early universe cooled it was trapped in a metastable state (it was supercooled), which it could only decay out of through the process of bubble nucleation via quantum tunneling. Bubbles of true vacuum spontaneously form in the sea of false vacuum and rapidly begin expanding at the speed of light. Guth recognized that this model was problematic because the model did not reheat properly: when the bubbles nucleated, they did not generate any radiation. Radiation could only be generated in collisions between bubble walls. But if inflation lasted long enough to solve the initial conditions problems, collisions between bubbles became exceedingly rare. In any one causal patch it is likely that only one bubble would nucleate.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The bubble collision problem was solved by Linde and independently by Andreas Albrecht and Paul Steinhardt in a model named "new inflation" or "slow-roll inflation" (Guth's model then became known as "old inflation"). In this model, instead of tunneling out of a false vacuum state, inflation occurred by a scalar field rolling down a potential energy hill. When the field rolls very slowly compared to the expansion of the Universe, inflation occurs. However, when the hill becomes steeper, inflation ends and reheating can occur.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Eventually, it was shown that new inflation does not produce a perfectly symmetric universe, but that quantum fluctuations in the inflaton are created. These fluctuations form the primordial seeds for all structure created in the later universe. These fluctuations were first calculated by Viatcheslav Mukhanov and G. V. Chibisov in analyzing Starobinsky's similar model. In the context of inflation, they were worked out independently of the work of Mukhanov and Chibisov at the three-week 1982 Nuffield Workshop on the Very Early Universe at Cambridge University. The fluctuations were calculated by four groups working separately over the course of the workshop: Stephen Hawking; Starobinsky; Guth and So-Young Pi; and Bardeen, Steinhardt and Turner.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Inflation is a mechanism for realizing the cosmological principle, which is the basis of the standard model of physical cosmology: it accounts for the homogeneity and isotropy of the observable universe. In addition, it accounts for the observed flatness and absence of magnetic monopoles. Since Guth's early work, each of these observations has received further confirmation, most impressively by the detailed observations of the cosmic microwave background made by the Planck spacecraft. This analysis shows that the Universe is flat to within percent, and that it is homogeneous and isotropic to one part in 100,000.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Inflation predicts that the structures visible in the Universe today formed through the gravitational collapse of perturbations that were formed as quantum mechanical fluctuations in the inflationary epoch. The detailed form of the spectrum of perturbations, called a nearly-scale-invariant Gaussian random field is very specific and has only two free parameters. One is the amplitude of the spectrum and the "spectral index", which measures the slight deviation from scale invariance predicted by inflation (perfect scale invariance corresponds to the idealized de Sitter universe).


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The other free parameter is the tensor to scalar ratio. The simplest inflation models, those without fine-tuning, predict a tensor to scalar ratio near 0.1 .


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Inflation predicts that the observed perturbations should be in thermal equilibrium with each other (these are called "adiabatic" or "isentropic" perturbations). This structure for the perturbations has been confirmed by the Planck spacecraft, WMAP spacecraft and other cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments, and galaxy surveys, especially the ongoing Sloan Digital Sky Survey. These experiments have shown that the one part in 100,000 inhomogeneities observed have exactly the form predicted by theory. There is evidence for a slight deviation from scale invariance. The "spectral index", is one for a scale-invariant Harrison–Zel'dovich spectrum. The simplest inflation models predict that is between 0.92 and 0.98 . This is the range that is possible without fine-tuning of the parameters related to energy. From Planck data it can be inferred that =0.968 ± 0.006, and a tensor to scalar ratio that is less than 0.11 . These are considered an important confirmation of the theory of inflation.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Various inflation theories have been proposed that make radically different predictions, but they generally have much more fine tuning than should be necessary. As a physical model, however, inflation is most valuable in that it robustly predicts the initial conditions of the Universe based on only two adjustable parameters: the spectral index (that can only change in a small range) and the amplitude of the perturbations. Except in contrived models, this is true regardless of how inflation is realized in particle physics.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Occasionally, effects are observed that appear to contradict the simplest models of inflation. The first-year WMAP data suggested that the spectrum might not be nearly scale-invariant, but might instead have a slight curvature. However, the third-year data revealed that the effect was a statistical anomaly. Another effect remarked upon since the first cosmic microwave background satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer is that the amplitude of the quadrupole moment of the CMB is unexpectedly low and the other low multipoles appear to be preferentially aligned with the ecliptic plane. Some have claimed that this is a signature of non-Gaussianity and thus contradicts the simplest models of inflation. Others have suggested that the effect may be due to other new physics, foreground contamination, or even publication bias.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: An experimental program is underway to further test inflation with more precise CMB measurements. In particular, high precision measurements of the so-called "B-modes" of the polarization of the background radiation could provide evidence of the gravitational radiation produced by inflation, and could also show whether the energy scale of inflation predicted by the simplest models (~ GeV) is correct. In March 2014, the BICEP2 team announced B-mode CMB polarization confirming inflation had been demonstrated. The team announced the tensor-to-scalar power ratio was between 0.15 and 0.27 (rejecting the null hypothesis; is expected to be 0 in the absence of inflation). However, on 19 June 2014, lowered confidence in confirming the findings was reported; on 19 September 2014, a further reduction in confidence was reported and, on 30 January 2015, even less confidence yet was reported. By 2018, additional data suggested, with 95% confidence, that formula_5 is 0.06 or lower: consistent with the null hypothesis, but still also consistent with many remaining models of inflation.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Other potentially corroborating measurements are expected from the Planck spacecraft, although it is unclear if the signal will be visible, or if contamination from foreground sources will interfere. Other forthcoming measurements, such as those of 21 centimeter radiation (radiation emitted and absorbed from neutral hydrogen before the first stars formed), may measure the power spectrum with even greater resolution than the CMB and galaxy surveys, although it is not known if these measurements will be possible or if interference with radio sources on Earth and in the galaxy will be too great.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In Guth's early proposal, it was thought that the inflaton was the Higgs field, the field that explains the mass of the elementary particles. It is now believed by some that the inflaton cannot be the Higgs field


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: although the recent discovery of the Higgs boson has increased the number of works considering the Higgs field as inflaton.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: One problem of this identification is the current tension with experimental data at the electroweak scale, which is currently under study at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Other models of inflation relied on the properties of Grand Unified Theories. Since the simplest models of grand unification have failed, it is now thought by many physicists that inflation will be included in a supersymmetric theory such as string theory or a supersymmetric grand unified theory. At present, while inflation is understood principally by its detailed predictions of the initial conditions for the hot early universe, the particle physics is largely "ad hoc" modelling. As such, although predictions of inflation have been consistent with the results of observational tests, many open questions remain.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: One of the most severe challenges for inflation arises from the need for fine tuning. In new inflation, the "slow-roll conditions" must be satisfied for inflation to occur. The slow-roll conditions say that the inflaton potential must be flat (compared to the large vacuum energy) and that the inflaton particles must have a small mass. New inflation requires the Universe to have a scalar field with an especially flat potential and special initial conditions. However, explanations for these fine-tunings have been proposed. For example, classically scale invariant field theories, where scale invariance is broken by quantum effects, provide an explanation of the flatness of inflationary potentials, as long as the theory can be studied through perturbation theory.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Linde proposed a theory known as "chaotic inflation" in which he suggested that the conditions for inflation were actually satisfied quite generically. Inflation will occur in virtually any universe that begins in a chaotic, high energy state that has a scalar field with unbounded potential energy. However, in his model the inflaton field necessarily takes values larger than one Planck unit: for this reason, these are often called "large field" models and the competing new inflation models are called "small field" models. In this situation, the predictions of effective field theory are thought to be invalid, as renormalization should cause large corrections that could prevent inflation.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: This problem has not yet been resolved and some cosmologists argue that the small field models, in which inflation can occur at a much lower energy scale, are better models. While inflation depends on quantum field theory (and the semiclassical approximation to quantum gravity) in an important way, it has not been completely reconciled with these theories.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Brandenberger commented on fine-tuning in another situation. The amplitude of the primordial inhomogeneities produced in inflation is directly tied to the energy scale of inflation. This scale is suggested to be around GeV or times the Planck energy. The natural scale is naïvely the Planck scale so this small value could be seen as another form of fine-tuning (called a hierarchy problem): the energy density given by the scalar potential is down by compared to the Planck density. This is not usually considered to be a critical problem, however, because the scale of inflation corresponds naturally to the scale of gauge unification.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In many models, the inflationary phase of the Universe's expansion lasts forever in at least some regions of the Universe. This occurs because inflating regions expand very rapidly, reproducing themselves. Unless the rate of decay to the non-inflating phase is sufficiently fast, new inflating regions are produced more rapidly than non-inflating regions. In such models, most of the volume of the Universe is continuously inflating at any given time.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: All models of eternal inflation produce an infinite, hypothetical multiverse, typically a fractal. The multiverse theory has created significant dissension in the scientific community about the viability of the inflationary model.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Paul Steinhardt, one of the original architects of the inflationary model, introduced the first example of eternal inflation in 1983. He showed that the inflation could proceed forever by producing bubbles of non-inflating space filled with hot matter and radiation surrounded by empty space that continues to inflate. The bubbles could not grow fast enough to keep up with the inflation. Later that same year, Alexander Vilenkin showed that eternal inflation is generic.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Although new inflation is classically rolling down the potential, quantum fluctuations can sometimes lift it to previous levels. These regions in which the inflaton fluctuates upwards expand much faster than regions in which the inflaton has a lower potential energy, and tend to dominate in terms of physical volume. It has been shown that any inflationary theory with an unbounded potential is eternal. There are well-known theorems that this steady state cannot continue forever into the past. Inflationary spacetime, which is similar to de Sitter space, is incomplete without a contracting region. However, unlike de Sitter space, fluctuations in a contracting inflationary space collapse to form a gravitational singularity, a point where densities become infinite. Therefore, it is necessary to have a theory for the Universe's initial conditions.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In eternal inflation, regions with inflation have an exponentially growing volume, while regions that are not inflating don't. This suggests that the volume of the inflating part of the Universe in the global picture is always unimaginably larger than the part that has stopped inflating, even though inflation eventually ends as seen by any single pre-inflationary observer. Scientists disagree about how to assign a probability distribution to this hypothetical anthropic landscape. If the probability of different regions is counted by volume, one should expect that inflation will never end or applying boundary conditions that a local observer exists to observe it, that inflation will end as late as possible.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Some physicists believe this paradox can be resolved by weighting observers by their pre-inflationary volume. Others believe that there is no resolution to the paradox and that the multiverse is a critical flaw in the inflationary paradigm. Paul Steinhardt, who first introduced the eternal inflationary model, later became one of its most vocal critics for this reason.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Some physicists have tried to avoid the initial conditions problem by proposing models for an eternally inflating universe with no origin. These models propose that while the Universe, on the largest scales, expands exponentially it was, is and always will be, spatially infinite and has existed, and will exist, forever.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Other proposals attempt to describe the ex nihilo creation of the Universe based on quantum cosmology and the following inflation. Vilenkin put forth one such scenario. Hartle and Hawking offered the no-boundary proposal for the initial creation of the Universe in which inflation comes about naturally.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Guth described the inflationary universe as the "ultimate free lunch": new universes, similar to our own, are continually produced in a vast inflating background. Gravitational interactions, in this case, circumvent (but do not violate) the first law of thermodynamics (energy conservation) and the second law of thermodynamics (entropy and the arrow of time problem). However, while there is consensus that this solves the initial conditions problem, some have disputed this, as it is much more likely that the Universe came about by a quantum fluctuation. Don Page was an outspoken critic of inflation because of this anomaly. He stressed that the thermodynamic arrow of time necessitates low entropy initial conditions, which would be highly unlikely. According to them, rather than solving this problem, the inflation theory aggravates it – the reheating at the end of the inflation era increases entropy, making it necessary for the initial state of the Universe to be even more orderly than in other Big Bang theories with no inflation phase.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Hawking and Page later found ambiguous results when they attempted to compute the probability of inflation in the Hartle-Hawking initial state. Other authors have argued that, since inflation is eternal, the probability doesn't matter as long as it is not precisely zero: once it starts, inflation perpetuates itself and quickly dominates the Universe. However, Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo argued that the probability of an inflationary cosmos, consistent with today's observations, emerging by a random fluctuation from some pre-existent state is much higher than that of a non-inflationary cosmos. This is because the "seed" amount of non-gravitational energy required for the inflationary cosmos is so much less than that for a non-inflationary alternative, which outweighs any entropic considerations.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Another problem that has occasionally been mentioned is the trans-Planckian problem or trans-Planckian effects. Since the energy scale of inflation and the Planck scale are relatively close, some of the quantum fluctuations that have made up the structure in our universe were smaller than the Planck length before inflation. Therefore, there ought to be corrections from Planck-scale physics, in particular the unknown quantum theory of gravity. Some disagreement remains about the magnitude of this effect: about whether it is just on the threshold of detectability or completely undetectable.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Another kind of inflation, called "hybrid inflation", is an extension of new inflation. It introduces additional scalar fields, so that while one of the scalar fields is responsible for normal slow roll inflation, another triggers the end of inflation: when inflation has continued for sufficiently long, it becomes favorable to the second field to decay into a much lower energy state.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: In hybrid inflation, one scalar field is responsible for most of the energy density (thus determining the rate of expansion), while another is responsible for the slow roll (thus determining the period of inflation and its termination). Thus fluctuations in the former inflaton would not affect inflation termination, while fluctuations in the latter would not affect the rate of expansion. Therefore, hybrid inflation is not eternal. When the second (slow-rolling) inflaton reaches the bottom of its potential, it changes the location of the minimum of the first inflaton's potential, which leads to a fast roll of the inflaton down its potential, leading to termination of inflation.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Dark energy is broadly similar to inflation and is thought to be causing the expansion of the present-day universe to accelerate. However, the energy scale of dark energy is much lower,  GeV, roughly 27 orders of magnitude less than the scale of inflation.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The discovery of flux compactifications opened the way for reconciling inflation and string theory. "Brane inflation" suggests that inflation arises from the motion of D-branes in the compactified geometry, usually towards a stack of anti-D-branes. This theory, governed by the "Dirac-Born-Infeld action", is different from ordinary inflation. The dynamics are not completely understood. It appears that special conditions are necessary since inflation occurs in tunneling between two vacua in the string landscape. The process of tunneling between two vacua is a form of old inflation, but new inflation must then occur by some other mechanism.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: When investigating the effects the theory of loop quantum gravity would have on cosmology, a loop quantum cosmology model has evolved that provides a possible mechanism for cosmological inflation. Loop quantum gravity assumes a quantized spacetime. If the energy density is larger than can be held by the quantized spacetime, it is thought to bounce back.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Other models have been advanced that are claimed to explain some or all of the observations addressed by inflation.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The big bounce hypothesis attempts to replace the cosmic singularity with a cosmic contraction and bounce, thereby explaining the initial conditions that led to the big bang.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The flatness and horizon problems are naturally solved in the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity, without needing an exotic form of matter or free parameters.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: This theory extends general relativity by removing a constraint of the symmetry of the affine connection and regarding its antisymmetric part, the torsion tensor, as a dynamical variable. The minimal coupling between torsion and Dirac spinors generates a spin-spin interaction that is significant in fermionic matter at extremely high densities. Such an interaction averts the unphysical Big Bang singularity, replacing it with a cusp-like bounce at a finite minimum scale factor, before which the Universe was contracting. The rapid expansion immediately after the Big Bounce explains why the present Universe at largest scales appears spatially flat, homogeneous and isotropic. As the density of the Universe decreases, the effects of torsion weaken and the Universe smoothly enters the radiation-dominated era.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The ekpyrotic and cyclic models are also considered adjuncts to inflation. These models solve the horizon problem through an expanding epoch well "before" the Big Bang, and then generate the required spectrum of primordial density perturbations during a contracting phase leading to a Big Crunch. The Universe passes through the Big Crunch and emerges in a hot Big Bang phase. In this sense they are reminiscent of Richard Chace Tolman's oscillatory universe; in Tolman's model, however, the total age of the Universe is necessarily finite, while in these models this is not necessarily so. Whether the correct spectrum of density fluctuations can be produced, and whether the Universe can successfully navigate the Big Bang/Big Crunch transition, remains a topic of controversy and current research. Ekpyrotic models avoid the magnetic monopole problem as long as the temperature at the Big Crunch/Big Bang transition remains below the Grand Unified Scale, as this is the temperature required to produce magnetic monopoles in the first place. As things stand, there is no evidence of any 'slowing down' of the expansion, but this is not surprising as each cycle is expected to last on the order of a trillion years.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: String theory requires that, in addition to the three observable spatial dimensions, additional dimensions exist that are curled up or compactified (see also Kaluza–Klein theory). Extra dimensions appear as a frequent component of supergravity models and other approaches to quantum gravity. This raised the contingent question of why four space-time dimensions became large and the rest became unobservably small. An attempt to address this question, called "string gas cosmology", was proposed by Robert Brandenberger and Cumrun Vafa. This model focuses on the dynamics of the early universe considered as a hot gas of strings. Brandenberger and Vafa show that a dimension of spacetime can only expand if the strings that wind around it can efficiently annihilate each other. Each string is a one-dimensional object, and the largest number of dimensions in which two strings will generically intersect (and, presumably, annihilate) is three. Therefore, the most likely number of non-compact (large) spatial dimensions is three. Current work on this model centers on whether it can succeed in stabilizing the size of the compactified dimensions and produce the correct spectrum of primordial density perturbations. The original model did not "solve the entropy and flatness problems of standard cosmology", although Brandenburger and coauthors later argued that these problems can be eliminated by implementing string gas cosmology in the context of a bouncing-universe scenario.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Cosmological models employing a variable speed of light have been proposed to resolve the horizon problem of and provide an alternative to cosmic inflation. In the VSL models, the fundamental constant "c", denoting the speed of light in vacuum, is greater in the early universe than its present value, effectively increasing the particle horizon at the time of decoupling sufficiently to account for the observed isotropy of the CMB.


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Since its introduction by Alan Guth in 1980, the inflationary paradigm has become widely accepted. Nevertheless, many physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science have voiced criticisms, claiming untestable predictions and a lack of serious empirical support. In 1999, John Earman and Jesús Mosterín published a thorough critical review of inflationary cosmology, concluding,


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: As pointed out by Roger Penrose from 1986 on, in order to work, inflation requires extremely specific initial conditions of its own, so that the problem (or pseudo-problem) of initial conditions is not solved:


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: The problem of specific or "fine-tuned" initial conditions would not have been solved; it would have gotten worse. At a conference in 2015, Penrose said that


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: A recurrent criticism of inflation is that the invoked inflaton field does not correspond to any known physical field, and that its potential energy curve seems to be an ad hoc contrivance to accommodate almost any data obtainable. Paul Steinhardt, one of the founding fathers of inflationary cosmology, has recently become one of its sharpest critics. He calls 'bad inflation' a period of accelerated expansion whose outcome conflicts with observations, and 'good inflation' one compatible with them:


title: Inflation (cosmology)

text: Together with Anna Ijjas and Abraham Loeb, he wrote articles claiming that the inflationary paradigm is in trouble in view of the data from the Planck satellite.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Samuel Paul Bowie (born March 17, 1961) is an American former professional basketball player. A national sensation in high school and outstanding collegian and Olympic team member, Bowie's professional promise was undermined by repeated injuries to his legs and feet. In spite of the setbacks, the and center played ten seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA).


title: Sam Bowie

text: Projected as a solid first-rounder in the 1984 NBA draft, Bowie was chosen by the Portland Trail Blazers as the second selection, ahead of Michael Jordan, due to Portland already having drafted Clyde Drexler just a year before.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie was born on March 17, 1961, as the son of Ben Bowie and Cathy “Sammy” Bowie. His father was and had played basketball for the Harlem Magicians for six seasons. Bowie's parents divorced when he was 12. After the divorce, Bowie lived with both of his parents in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Concerned about not showing favoritism toward either parent, he then lived with his maternal grandmother until going to college.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie was a sophomore in college when his father died suddenly, aged 45, when a cyst on his lung burst. Of his father Ben, who died at age 45, Bowie said, "We loved each other more than two individuals could. But we never could say, 'I love you.' Neither of us was that kind of person. That's the thing I'm most sorry about, that I didn't get to tell him I loved him before he was gone."


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie attended Lebanon High School in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. He played on its basketball team under Coach Chick Hess. Bowie described Hess, "He's a father. He's responsible. He’s got a head on his shoulder. He just doesn't have two legs that are serving him well. He adjusted to the big-time world. He grew up with blue-collar people who knew what it was like to work for a living. We're all proud of him. He got what he could out of playing pro sports."


title: Sam Bowie

text: A star player, Bowie was heavily recruited. He averaged over 28 points and 18 rebounds per game, and was a McDonald's All-American and "Parade" All-American. As a junior, he led the Cedars to the state finals, where they lost by a point to Schenley High School of Pittsburgh. “When I say this, I mean it with all my heart, from the Kentucky experience to all of my years in pro ball, when I reminisce I go back to my Lebanon Cedar days,” said Bowie in 2018. “I just wish we could’ve won that state championship game. Fifty-one to fifty, we were so close."


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie was named national player of the year in 1979. He received the honor over Harrisonburg, Virginia's Ralph Sampson, another highly recruited center. Sampson and Bowie played in the annual Capital Classic all-star game, which was dubbed the "Battle of the Giants" Played at the Capital Centre, the game featured the best players in the Washington, D.C. area playing against an all-star squad composed of players from across the United States.


title: Sam Bowie

text: In February, 1979 a "Sports Illustrated" magazine article feature focused on Bowie, Sampson and Steve Stipanovich as the best high school centers.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie played in the 1979 McDonald's All-American Game. The memorable rosters included: Antoine Carr, Quintin Dailey, Sidney Green, Clark Kellogg, Greg Kite, Sidney Lowe, John Paxson, Ralph Sampson, Byron Scott, Steve Stipanovich, Isiah Thomas, Dereck Whittenburg, Dominique Wilkins and James Worthy.


title: Sam Bowie

text: As a freshman during the 1979–80 season at Kentucky, Bowie averaged 12.9 points, 8.1 rebounds and 2.1 blocks per game. Kentucky finished 29–6 and advanced to the 1980 NCAA tournament. Bowie had 13 points, 11 rebounds and 3 blocks in Kentucky's 97–78 victory over Florida State. He played nine minutes, fouling out with 2 points and 3 rebounds in a 55–54 loss to Duke.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie's sophomore season saw him average 17.5 points, 9.1 rebounds, and 2.9 blocks per game. He was named a third-team NCAA Basketball All-American by the Associated Press. In 1981, he set, and now shares, the Kentucky record for most blocked shots in a game, with nine against St. John's.


title: Sam Bowie

text: However, Bowie began sustaining injuries that would plague the remainder of his basketball career. In the third-to-last game of his sophomore season against Vanderbilt, Bowie went up for a dunk but came down off balance. He landed with most of his weight on his left leg, saying that he felt pain but initially tried to play through it. Kentucky qualified for the 48-team 1981 NCAA tournament as the #2 seed in the Mideast Region, with a first-round bye. In the Wildcats' first game of the tournament, against #7 seed Alabama-Birmingham, Bowie fouled out, playing 21 minutes, as Kentucky was eliminated by UAB 69–62.


title: Sam Bowie

text: After the 1980–1981 season, a stress fracture in his left tibia was discovered, the injury caused Bowie to miss the entire 1981–82 season. The stress fracture did not heal completely and Bowie sat out the entire 1982–83 season as well. Doctors at first thought the pain in the left leg was due to shin splints, but just before the season in 1981, new X-rays revealed Bowie had a stress fracture he had been playing on. He was in a cast for 44 weeks. But, after removing the cast, the injury did not heal properly. Bowie had to have it surgically repaired, with a bone graft. As his class had graduated, Bowie applied for and was granted an NCAA medical redshirt to allow him another year of college eligibility.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie returned for the 1983–84 season. Having not played in two years, he played in all 34 Kentucky games and averaged 10.5 points, 9.2 rebounds, and 1.9 blocks. He was named to the Associated Press second-team All-American team. During his senior season, his heroics in a game against rival Louisville earned him a spot on the cover of "Sports Illustrated". Bowie, along with fellow "Twin Tower" Melvin Turpin (as the Kentucky frontcourt duo was called), and Kenny Walker led Kentucky to the SEC championship, the SEC Tournament Championship, a top-three national ranking, and a 26–4 season record.


title: Sam Bowie

text: In the 1984 NCAA tournament, the Wildcats defeated Brigham Young 93–68, in-state rival Louisville 72–67 and Illinois 54–51 to advance to the Final Four in Seattle. Bowie had 16 points and 6 rebounds against BYU, 8 points, 12 rebounds and 3 blocks against Louisville and 11 points and 14 rebounds against Illinois.


title: Sam Bowie

text: In the Final Four, Kentucky met eventual NCAA Champion Georgetown, with Patrick Ewing in the semi-finals. Kentucky led at the half, but Georgetown defeated the Wildcats 53–40, ending Bowie's college career. Bowie had 10 points, 11 rebounds and two blocks in the loss. Ewing had 8 points and 9 rebounds with 0 blocks.


title: Sam Bowie

text: In 96 career games at Kentucky, Bowie averaged 13.4 points, 8.8 rebounds, 2.3 blocks and 1.4 assists on 69.9% shooting. Bowie played 3 seasons in five years.


title: Sam Bowie

text: In the summer of 1980, Bowie was selected for the United States Olympic men's basketball team. The 1980 United States Olympic team was coached by Dave Gavitt and assisted by Larry Brown. The 1980 US team was the youngest American national team ever assembled. Alongside Bowie were team members Mark Aguirre, Rolando Blackman, Michael Brooks, Bill Hanzlik, Alton Lister, Rodney McCray, Isiah Thomas, Darnell Valentine, Danny Vranes, Buck Williams and Al Wood.


title: Sam Bowie

text: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan caused the United States and 66 other countries to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Unable to compete in the Olympics due to the boycott, Team USA played a series of games against NBA all-star teams in various US cities, ending with a 5–1 record. The games were labeled the "Gold Medal Series". In the six games against NBA All-Stars, Bowie was Team USA's second-leading scorer and leading rebounder and shot-blocker, averaging 11.6 points, 6.9 rebounds, and 2.3 blocks. Bowie was 19 years old while playing on Team USA.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Many years later, he received one of 461 Congressional Gold Medals created especially for the spurned athletes.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Entering the 1984 NBA draft, although the Houston Rockets had tied with the Indiana Pacers for the NBA's worst record, the Pacers had traded the top pick to the Portland Trail Blazers in 1981 for center Tom Owens. In 1984, having beat the Blazers in a coin toss for first pick, the Rockets chose Houston center Hakeem Olajuwon. Unable to choose him, yet still seeking a center, the Blazers chose Bowie. Choosing third, the Chicago Bulls then drafted North Carolina shooting guard Michael Jordan.


title: Sam Bowie

text: At the time, picking Bowie made sense from the Blazers' perspective. The team had not had a solid big man since Bill Walton, one of its first major stars, left in 1979. Soon before the draft, the NBA fined the Blazers $250,000 (equivalent of $,000 in 2018) for improper contact with Olajuwon and center Patrick Ewing. A year earlier, Portland had drafted a shooting guard, Olajuwon's college teammate Clyde Drexler. Having both Drexler and Jim Paxson, the Blazers had little need on paper for another shooting guard. Still, in 2005, highlighting Bowie's injury-laden college career, ESPN named the Blazers' choice the worst draft pick in the history of North American professional sports. Also that year, arguing that teams should draft for talent and not need, "Sports Illustrated" named Bowie the biggest draft bust in NBA history.


title: Sam Bowie

text: During his rookie season, Bowie played in 76 games and averaged 10 points and 8.6 rebounds, earning a spot on the NBA All-Rookie Team. However, in his second season, Bowie's leg injuries recurred. During a game against the Milwaukee Bucks at The MECCA, Bowie and teammate Jerome Kersey became entangled going for a rebound, and as they landed, Bowie's left tibia broke. He was carried off the floor on a stretcher.


title: Sam Bowie

text: "I firmly believe I can be one of the top centers in the league if I'm healthy," said Bowie. "One year, things are going to fall into place, and I'm going to show people how good I can be."


title: Sam Bowie

text: The next season, Bowie returned. In the season's fifth game against the Dallas Mavericks, Bowie went up for a jump hook shot. As he went up, his legs buckled underneath him and Bowie fell to the floor. He suffered a season-ending fracture of his right tibia. Bowie compared the feeling having his leg chopped by an ax. "It was not a pretty sight," Portland teammate Clyde Drexler recalled. "He went to make a move, fell, and threw the ball down hard off the court. I remember seeing part of the bone sticking out of his leg and how he was beating the floor over and over with his fist."


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie's subsequent surgery utilized three screws being placed in the bone to keep it together. However, two screws did not hold, so another operation was needed to put in three new screws.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Once again, Bowie came back to play. On October 17, 1987, during pregame warmups for a preseason game with the Cleveland Cavaliers, Bowie began feeling intense pain in his right leg just walking. Not wanting a stretcher, Bowie was carried off the court by his teammates and was diagnosed with a hairline fracture of his right tibia. On March 29, 1988, Bowie had surgery where he received a graft from his hip bone and had a metal plate with 10 screws permanently attached to his right shin. The injury effectively sidelined him for the next two seasons; he missed all of the 1987–88 season, as well as the first 62 games of the 1988–89 season. All told, Bowie played 63 games out of a possible 328 during his last four seasons in Portland.


title: Sam Bowie

text: “I have one huge regret,” said Bowie. “I wish I would’ve been more patient and didn’t come back as quickly as I did the second year I fractured my leg. You feel like you disappointed Portland. You’re getting paid a lot of money and you can’t play. I don’t know if it’s guilt or regret. But I’ve never been one to say, ‘Why me?’. I feel I should have an MD behind my name from all the education I've received from my own cases."


title: Sam Bowie

text: On June 24, 1989, Bowie, who had averaged 10.5 points per game with the Trail Blazers, was traded, along with a draft pick, to the New Jersey Nets in exchange for Buck Williams.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie's four seasons in New Jersey were his most productive, as he had no major injuries. Bowie averaged 12.8 points and 8.2 rebounds per game and never missed more than 20 games in a season. His best season was his first with the Nets where he averaged a double-double with 14.7 points and 10.1 rebounds per game. Bowie also hit a career-high in points per game in 1991–92 with 15.0 and played a career-high 79 games in 1992–93 averaging 9.1 points per game and seven rebounds.


title: Sam Bowie

text: "My main objective is to play the game for the fun of it and the love of it," said Bowie, "Every time I go off the court, I'm thankful I didn't get hurt again. I think too many people take their health for granted.


title: Sam Bowie

text: After the 1992–93 season, Bowie was traded for Benoit Benjamin being sent from New Jersey to the Los Angeles Lakers. However, Bowie's leg injury problems recurred. Bowie played in 92 games in the two seasons combined, starting in 17 of them. Although Jerry West, the team's general manager, wanted Bowie to continue to play for the Lakers, Bowie decided to retire from professional basketball after the 1994–95 season. He desired to follow his passion and become involved in harness racing.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie, Bill Walton, and Greg Oden are frequently cited together. All three were centers, drafted high by Portland, who failed to achieve their potential due to career-altering injuries.


title: Sam Bowie

text: "You know, I go speak and visit at hospitals a lot—and not to sound mushy—but I've seen 7-, 8-, 9-year-old kids who have had their legs amputated because of bone cancer or a car accident," Bowie said. "That's when it puts things into perspective. There's a kid who wishes he had a leg to break. That's when I realize how lucky I am. I can't complain about the hand I've been dealt. Sure, I've had my share of surgery and broken bones, but these things were meant to be. I'm a Christian and I've always felt that tomorrow is predetermined and that you will never be put through more than you can handle."


title: Sam Bowie

text: Over his NBA career, Bowie averaged 10.9 points, 7.5 rebounds and 1.78 blocks per game. He hit 45.2% of his attempted field goals (2,127 made of 4,702 attempted), and 30.2% of his three-point shots (32 made of 106 attempted).


title: Sam Bowie

text: After he retired from basketball, Bowie returned to Lexington, Kentucky. Bowie is involved in harness racing, both owning and training horses that run at The Red Mile in Lexington.


title: Sam Bowie

text: Bowie has been married twice. He has three now-grown children. "I was blessed in the sense that I was able to be a full-time father." Bowie said.


title: Sam Bowie

text: In 2012, Bowie was featured in an ESPN "SEC Storied" documentary, "Going Big". In it, he admitted hiding the extent of his leg troubles from the Blazers. For instance, he said that when a doctor tapped his left tibia with a mallet, he claimed not to feel anything when he was actually in noticeable pain. He developed leg trouble as early as high school; film from the late 1970s shows him struggling to avoid undue strain on his legs and feet.


title: Nivea (singer)

text: Nivea B. Hamilton (also known as Nivea H. Nash) (born March 24, 1982), better known by her mononym Nivea, is an American R&B singer whose recordings reached the "Billboard" charts during the early 2000s. Nivea is known most for her Grammy-nominated hit "Don't Mess with My Man" as well as "Laundromat" and "Okay" featuring YoungbloodZ & Lil' Jon. She has released three studio albums: "Nivea" (2001), "Complicated" (2005), "Animalistic" (2006), and an independently released extended play "Nivea: Undercover" (2011). On September 26, 2019, she released her album "Mirrors", including the single "Circles".


title: Nivea (singer)

text: Nivea was born in Savannah, Georgia, the youngest of three sisters. She sang in a church choir and admired the music of Mariah Carey. Nivea admitted to being shy in a BET "Finding Nivea" interview. She said, "I never wanted anyone to hear me sing... my parents would turn down the radio [and I would automatically stop]."


title: Nivea (singer)

text: In 2000, Nivea appeared on Mystikal's hit single "Danger (Been So Long)" which garnered her some buzz. Following the success of it, she had signed with Jive Records and released her debut solo single "Don't Mess with the Radio " in 2001 which garnered moderate success, peaking at No. 90 on the Hot 100 and No. 85 on R&B. Her label then decided to focus on her internationally, releasing her self-titled debut album in Australia and Japan first. On September 25, 2001, the album was released in United States peaking at No. 80 on the Billboard 200 and No. 85 on R&B. "Run Away (I Wanna Be with You)" (featuring Pusha T) was released as the album's next single in Japan in December 2001.


title: Nivea (singer)

text: In August 2002, she released her second U.S. single, "Don't Mess with My Man" featuring Brian and Brandon Casey (of R&B group Jagged Edge). The single was a big hit, peaking at No. 8 on the Hot 100 at No. 25 on R&B, fueling album sales of her debut. The following year, "Don't Mess with My Man" was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.


title: Nivea (singer)

text: The album's third U.S. single "Laundromat" featured singer R. Kelly and starred comedian Nick Cannon playing her love interest in the music video. The single became another hit for the singer, peaking at No. 20 on R&B and No. 58 on the Hot 100.


title: Nivea (singer)

text: Following the success of her first album, she began work on her second studio album, releasing a buzz single "You Wanna Touch Me" featuring rapper Rasheeda and Akon which peaked at No. 86 on R&B. After meeting Terius "The-Dream" Nash, they began dating and he soon handled the primary production on her forthcoming album.


title: Nivea (singer)

text: In 2005, she released the project's lead single "Okay" which featured YoungbloodZ and Lil' Jon. The single became a hit, peaking at No. 14 on R&B and No. 40 on Billboard's Hot 100. In May, she released her second album "Complicated" which peaked at No. 9 on the R&B chart and No. 37 on the Billboard 200. A second single, "Parking Lot" was released shortly before she got pregnant with her first child. Jive Records subsequently dropped promotion for the project, although she appeared on Soul Train the following year and performed "Complicated" which was originally planned to be the third single. After her departure from the label, she gave birth to her twins in April. That same year, she begun work on her next studio album and signed a new contract with Formula Records.