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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The shock waves are still reverberating from ...

One of the things you learn when talking to scientists in different fields is that what the popular scientific press reports as 'controversial' very often isn't controversial to them at all. But it's ...

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 ...

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 ...

No matter how elegant your theory is, experimental data will have the last word. Observations of the retrograde motion of the planets were fundamental to the Copernican revolution, in which the sun ...

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 ...

Scientists announced today (March 17) that they have likely found the long-sought smoking gun for the theory of cosmic inflation, suggesting that the universe did indeed expand at many times the speed ...

In order to be considered a scientific theory, there are three things your idea needs to do. First off, you have to reproduce all of the successes of the prior, leading theory. Second, you need to ...