We prove that the viscous Burgers equation has a globally defined smooth solution in all dimensions provided the initial condition and the forcing term are smooth and bounded together with their derivatives. Such solutions may have infinite energy. The proof does not rely on energy estimates, but on a combination of the maximum principle and quantitative Schauder estimates. We obtain precise bounds on the sup norm of the solution and its derivatives, making it plain that there is no exponential increase in time. In particular, these bounds are time-independent if the forcing term is zero. To get a classical solution, it suffices to assume that the initial condition and the forcing term have bounded derivatives up to order two.
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