Lu Yin

A pendulum swings in thick syrup. In the first fractions of a second, it moves quickly, but the syrup slows it down, and then suddenly the syrup becomes thinner, and the pendulum speeds up again. Something similar might have happened to our universe.

For decades, two independent methods of measuring the rate at which galaxies are flying apart, the Hubble constant, have given conflicting numbers. The situation resembled a room with two thermometers showing different temperatures.