Yu Hamada

Immediately after the Big Bang, in the seething cauldron of the cooling Universe, much like in unevenly hardening glass, stresses appeared — hairline cracks in reality, cosmic strings. Picture a tightrope walker balancing on an invisible cable stretched across the abyss of warped spacetime.

In the hot early universe, like in an overcrowded dance hall, magnetic monopoles swirled — loner particles carrying only a north or only a south pole. In an ordinary magnet, poles always come in pairs, but here each one is on its own. Theories that unify all forces of nature predict that such particles should have been produced in vast numbers, yet today we don't see them.