inflation – Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang

Steve Nadis — Fri, 31 May 2024 14:08:57 +0000

About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s. The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the 1980s, when many cosmologists came to believe that in its first moments...

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Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft

Elise Cutts — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 14:50:47 +0000

At a conference in Japan a few years ago, David Dunsky attended a talk about gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time created when massive objects like stars and black holes accelerate. Dunsky was a graduate student in particle physics at the time, and his interests seemingly lay elsewhere. Particle physicists seek the more fundamental truth underpinning the physical rules we’re...

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She Turns Fluids Into ‘Black Holes’ and ‘Inflating Universes’

Thomas Lewton — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 15:08:50 +0000

There are times and places in the universe that experiments cannot reach, and may never be able to reach. What exactly goes on inside black holes, and what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, are matters of pure theoretical speculation. For two decades, Silke Weinfurtner, a physicist at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, has been designing “analogue...

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Asymmetry Detected in the Distribution of Galaxies

Katie McCormick — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 15:16:46 +0000

Physicists believe they have detected a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky. If confirmed, the finding would point to features of the unknown fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang. “If this result is real, someone’s going to get a Nobel Prize,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the analysis.

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How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything

Charlie Wood — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 13:32:15 +0000

Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, declaring that God could do anything, even create a vacuum. Then a mere scientist pulled it off. Otto von Guericke invented a pump to suck the air from within a hollow copper sphere...

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