Top Highlights

• refinement of the big bang theory, first proposed by physicist Alan Guth of MIT. In the inflationary scenario, in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second, a mysterious antigravity force caused the universe to expand much faster than originally thought. The inflationary period was unimaginably explosive, with the universe expanding much fas...
• In the 1940s, Hoyle was not enamored of the big bang theory. One defect in the theory was that Hubble, because of errors in measuring light from distant galaxies, had miscalculated the age of the universe to be 1.8 billion years. Geologists claimed that Earth and the solar system were probably many billions of years old. How could the universe be y...
• there were two types of cosmologies in religion, the first based on a single moment when God created the universe, the second based on the idea that the universe always was and always will be. They couldn’t both be right, I thought.
• What is gradually emerging from the data is a grand synthesis of these two opposing mythologies. Perhaps, scientists speculate, Genesis occurs repeatedly in a timeless ocean of Nirvana. In this new picture, our universe may be compared to a bubble floating in a much larger “ocean,” with new bubbles forming all the time.
• hyperspace. A growing number of physicists suggest that our universe did indeed spring forth from a fiery cataclysm, the big bang, but that it also coexists in an eternal ocean of other universes. If we are right, big bangs are taking place even as you read this sentence.