Entropy Production and Cosmological Inflation

The notion of inflation (past or present) in standard cosmological models is shown to be a consequence of a sufficiently high second law entropy production from the internal heating of the universal expansion. The longitudinal viscous internal heating of matter requires neither ``inflaton'' fields nor ``quintessence'' fields which in theory may induce a cosmological term into the Einstein equations. The purely thermodynamic principles required to understand inflation within the context of the standard general relativity equations will be discussed in detail.