Causality and the Doppler Peaks

Abstract

Could cosmic structure have formed by the action of causal physics within the standard hot big bang, or was a prior period of inflation required? Recently there has been some discussion of whether causal sources could reproduce the pattern of Doppler peaks of the standard scale-invariant adiabatic theory. This paper gives a rigorous definition of causality, and a causal decomposition of a general source. I present an example of a simple causal source which mimics the standard adiabatic theory, accurately reproducing the behaviour of the local intrinsic temperature perturbations.