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Big bang

How To Train Your Universe

How To Train Your Universe

Cosmologists don't give tips to newbie universe-builders, but we do ask how our universe evolved. It was quickly discovered that a simple Big Bang needed special and apparently arbitrary initial conditions in order to grow into the universe we now inhabit. But In 1980, physicist Alan Guth, then a post-doc at SLAC, realised that a mechanism he dubbed inflation made these "initial conditions problems" manageable, even if it didn't solve them completely.