For most of us, “inflation” is a term that comes up only in conversations about the economy or flat tires. But for many cosmologists, inflation is the ultimate word in understanding how the universe ...

Inflation—in the cosmic sense, at least—has been in the news lately. Early this year, researchers announced that they found conclusive evidence that our Universe experienced a period of rapid ...

On March 17th, physicists with the BICEP2 experiment announced they had detected the remnant of gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, the light left over from the big bang. Although ...

The origins of space and time are among the most mysterious and contentious topics in science. Our February 2017 article “Pop Goes the Universe” argues against the dominant idea that the early cosmos ...

Cosmology and quantum physics both offer tantalizing possibilities that we inhabit just one reality among many. But testing ...

Ever since the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe developed in the 1920s and 1930s, the idea has had its skeptics. The radical concept stated that the universe is expanding; run time ...

DALLAS — Back in the old days, like half a century ago, many astronomers and physicists thought they understood the universe, more or less. It looked pretty much the same everywhere, so it probably ...

The 2013 Gruber Cosmology Prize recognises Viatcheslav Mukhanov and Alexei Starobinsky for their formative contributions to inflationary theory, an essential component for understanding the evolution ...

Stephen Hawking and 32 of his fellow scientists have written an angry letter responding to a recent Scientific American article about how the universe began. In it, they declare their "categorical ...

It may sound like something from a science fiction movie, but recent research from the Tufts Institute of Cosmology confirms the possibility that multiple universes could exist within black holes. The ...

The standard model of cosmology includes a period of extremely rapid expansion at early times. This period, known as cosmological inflation, lasted for only a tiny fraction of a second, but provided ...