The Universe could have been born from 'nothing' during the quantum Big Bang, like a soap bubble — suggested Hawking. But calculations yielded a tiny world that would instantly collapse into a point.

The way out was found by geometry. Replace the familiar sphere with a three-dimensional donut. Thanks to its hole, the donut offers many ways to loop around: you can thread a loop through the hole, or wrap around the outside. Each such loop represents a distinct quantum birth path. When physicists summed up these possibilities, long inflation — superfast expansion — turned from a rarity into a near inevitability. Thus, Guth's idea gained firm support.

Unexpectedly, in the calculations, the Riemann zeta function emerged — a mysterious staircase into the world of prime numbers. It turned out that a donut-universe almost certainly inflates by a factor of $10^{108}$. Gravity and spacetime curvature don't distort the overall picture, and ancient light (cosmic microwave background) carries the echo of that birth.