Since I expect the concept of gravitational waves to once become very popular in the next few days, I wrote some quick notes on them, I.e., where they come from. They are handwritten, as I didn’t have time to LaTeX them, but, hopefully, they’ll be useful to interested readers!
Also note that, gravitational waves are not necessarily evidence of inflation. I wrote a paper a few years ago, describing a anisotropic early universe that had an epoch of plane waves that isotropized to our present-day universe. It can be seen here. It was subsequently published in Physical Review D.
Anyways, here are the notes (Interested readers should see the classic texts by Misner, Thorne, Wheeler, Landau and Lifshitz, or Stephani for more details).
Relativity Digest 