Superfluid helium-3 is like a crowded ice rink where figure skaters whirl synchronously in one direction. Sudden cooling is like a sudden 'freeze' command. Not everyone stops at once: some freeze, while others make an extra turn by inertia. Waves run across the rink and local vortices, defects, appear. Such 'freezing' is studied using computer simulations. The most noticeable wave is the Higgs mode, named after Peter Higgs: the density of the entire film oscillates like a stretched carpet. The ideas trace back to the work of Lev Landau. Surprisingly, the same equations describe the birth of defects in the cooling universe after the Big Bang and inflation, as well as in neutron stars with their Bose-Einstein condensate and in superconductors. Thus, a thin film of helium, through quantum field theory, connects a laboratory experiment with cosmic strings.