In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe expanded explosively — like a soap bubble swelling from a drop into a sphere. The ACT telescope, perched at 5,190 meters in the Chilean Andes, has sharpened the details of this process. Physicists found that the inflation was driven not just by gravity, but also by rising entropy — the drive toward chaos.

This idea isn't new: back in the day, Bekenstein and Hawking proved that for black holes, entropy depends on the area of the event horizon. The visible universe has a similar horizon. As our cosmic "film" stretches, its surface area grows, and with it, the number of possible microscopic states. Models where spacetime curvature takes a back seat to this principle matched the ACT data perfectly. During the inflation era proposed by Guth, entropy grew like an avalanche, imprinting an ever more intricate pattern on the horizon — like on a soap film.

Future observations of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime — will help confirm the hypothesis.