Was our imperfect world created by a clever but bumbling lab scientist?
Big bang ripple discovery lends credence to the theory that a superdense atom exploded to create our universe
The universe is utterly arbitrary, creation itself is flawed, and its creator might have little idea of what he, she or it was doing.
That was the worldview of Andrei Linde, a Russian-American physicist who until last week was mostly unknown outside of the cognoscenti of modern cosmology. Not any more.
Linde, along with Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is most famous for having developed the so-called inflation theory of the big bang. Last week, observational astronomers announced they have detected what has been called the holy grail of their field: ripples in the fabric of space-time that are echoes of the massive expansion of the universe called the big bang and which were long predicted by Guth and Linde.
The discovery of such gravitational waves would complete the big bang theory's explanation of the origin of universe. It's called inflation because they posit that at the blink of an eye after the big bang, the infant cosmos expanded exponentially, inflating in size by 100 trillion trillion times. The rapid ballooning explains why our universe has an even temperature all around: it would iron out all the wrinkles and irregularities of space-time.
In the world of science, last week was a very big deal. Nobel prizes have been handed out for works that are less significant.