Radical New Theory Rewrites the Story of the Earliest Universe
Following the Big Bang, our universe expanded at an exponential rate. According to this theory, known as cosmic inflation, the explosive growth produced tiny quantum fluctuations that later evolved into galaxies. Cosmic inflation neatly explains how our universe got so large and mostly homogenous, and that’s why it’s remained a strong theory in cosmology for decades. But it’s far from perfect. Cosmic inflation depends on certain theoretical assumptions that can get rather arbitrary—not ideal fo