Yerko Vásquez

A balloon is being inflated faster and faster. At first, it stretches smoothly, but at some point, the pump stutters — the speed drops, then picks up again. During this brief respite, tiny bubbles appear on the rubber. As inflation resumes, they turn into dense knots. Something similar happened to the universe itself right after the Big Bang.

Two magnets collide in a dark room, stick together into a clump, and a dull thud echoes. Black holes behave much the same way, except instead of magnets they carry electric charge, and instead of a thud, there's a burst of gravitational waves. But there's a third player in this story — an invisible field that physicists call scalar.