planck time

A jazz ensemble: at first, a cacophony of random notes. Then — a catchy riff that plays over and over. Such is the riddle of the origin of life — only in the language of chemistry.

A cloud of waves collapses under its own gravity. While it's loose, everything goes by the book: the field oscillates gently in nearly flat space, and approximate formulas work perfectly. But add just a bit more energy, and the picture changes. Physicists used a numerical model to catch the moment when simple calculations stop describing reality.

Gravity is a remarkably weak force. A small magnet holds a paperclip against the pull of an entire planet. Physicists have long sought the reason for this weakness, and one guess leads us into hidden dimensions. Perhaps gravity 'leaks' into them, losing strength in our three-dimensional world.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe expanded at a terrifying rate. This process is called inflation, and it smoothed out all the wrinkles, making the cosmos homogeneous. But what started inflation itself?

The cosmic microwave background is the petrified light of the first moments. Shortly after the Big Bang, microscopic quantum fluctuations were stretched by inflation to the scales of galactic superclusters.

In the first instants after birth, the universe might have been multidimensional, like a sheet of paper that suddenly gained thickness. This "thickness"—the extra dimensions — began to inflate rapidly. Such superfast growth is called inflation.

At the very beginning of the universe, when all of space was compressed into a point, the laws of physics break down. This point is called a singularity — an edge where our equations lose meaning. But what if it's not an end, but a special type of boundary? The authors of this work propose viewing the singularity as a free boundary.

Space is like a sheet of paper: gravity bends it, making lines converge toward the center. But if you bend too hard, the paper tears, just as space, under monstrous curvature, doesn't collapse into a point but forms a torn edge. That edge is the quantum boundary.

Since the end of the 20th century, we've known: the expansion of the Universe is accelerating — galaxies are flying apart faster and faster. The discovery brought a Nobel Prize to Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter, and Brian Schmidt.

Quantum noise, like the hiss of an untuned radio, filled the infant Universe. Alan Guth showed that superfast expansion (inflation) caused this ripple to freeze, giving rise to clumps of matter — the seeds of galaxies. A new method extends this picture to any theory of gravity.

The origin of the hot Big Bang is one of the greatest mysteries. The familiar picture: after inflation, the inflaton field transfers energy to ordinary particles, reheating the Universe. Yet dark matter and dark energy hint that nature has hidden sectors.

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.

For almost a century, cosmologists have been grappling with the mystery: what makes the Universe expand ever faster? The standard answer — dark energy — creates a monstrous discrepancy between the theoretical vacuum density and observations. But there's another path, one that turns causality on its head.

An eternal Universe where the measure of disorder (энтропия) grows is, for most of its time, a homogeneous void. In it, complex structures occasionally assemble by chance, such as fleeting consciousnesses — ‘мозги Больцмана’.

An ordinary magnet always carries two poles — north and south. Split it in half, and each piece immediately grows its own pair. But deep in particle theory lives a strange notion: the monopole — a particle carrying just one magnetic charge, a lone pole without a partner.

Ancient light, traveling 14 billion years, reaches us from all directions. At first glance, it looks perfectly smooth, but if you look closely, tiny fluctuations appear, like ripples on a still pond. Those ripples aren't random noise; they're an encoded history of the universe.

The birth of the universe resembles not an explosion, but a traffic jam. At first, a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, space expanded sluggishly, like cars stuck in gridlock. Then came a sharp surge — accelerated expansion, which cosmologists call inflation.

Quantum nothingness resembles water in a pot just before boiling. From time to time, a bubble spontaneously swells up — but not of steam, but of an entire universe. Such a bubble doesn't collapse; instead, it inflates into spacetime, triggering its own Big Bang. The only question is how often this happens.

Cosmology is going through strange times. On one hand, the standard model with dark matter and dark energy beautifully describes the large-scale structure. On the other, it's cracking at the seams.

The classic story of the Universe’s birth from a blazing point called the Big Bang raises uncomfortable questions: why is the cosmos so homogeneous, and what was before the singularity?

Our Solar System isn't an island in the void: it's a sensitive web stretched in a dark cosmic corner. Planets circle their orbits like dewdrops on threads, and we are the spider sensing the faintest tremor. That tremor betrays the approach of the catastrophe astronomers call the Big Rip.

First thing that comes to mind when thinking about the birth of the Universe is an explosion. But modern cosmology paints a more refined picture: birth through the neck of a wine glass. This geometry is not a sommelier's fantasy, but a rigorous form of Euclidean wormhole that connects two anti-de Sitter worlds.

Cosmology has long sought a loophole behind the Big Bang. Inflation, proposed by Alan Guth, stretches and smooths out primordial inhomogeneities, but what lit the fuse itself?

The Universe is like an inflating balloon. Quantum mechanics forbids measuring exactly how big it is and how fast it's inflating at the same time. This principle permeates the cosmos: a new equation states that the Universe's expansion and its size are linked by a fundamental uncertainty.

A huge orchestra is tuning up before a concert. Each instrument makes its own noise, and in the general hubbub it's hard to pick out individual sounds. But if the conductor gives a special flick of the baton for a second, all the violins will simultaneously hit one high note, and that pure tone will cut through the cacophony.

You're inflating a balloon, but with each pump of the bulb, the rubber doesn't just stretch: it subtly changes its elasticity. Gravity works similarly in the new model: not as a rigid stage for the cosmic play, but as a living material that responds to every speck of matter.

A neural network learning something new is like a traveler in mountainous terrain. Each piece of learned knowledge is a depression in the landscape into which the traveler rolls and gets stuck. To escape and reach a new basin, energy is needed. But as the traveler gains experience, the walls of their pit become steeper, and each subsequent climb requires more effort.

It all started with tiny quantum flickers on the primal canvas. Inflation — an avalanche-like expansion proposed by Alan Guth — stretched those brushstrokes to the scale of galaxies.

The equations of Einstein and the model of Lemaître led to the conclusion that the Universe began from an infinitely dense point — the singularity of the Big Bang. At that point, familiar physics broke down, leaving the mystery of the first moment.

The universe wasn't born in silence. Primordial gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime — still carry the echo of that event. Scientists try to hear it in two ways. Low 'notes' are captured in the Big Bang's afterglow — light emitted 380,000 years later.

A spring compressed to the limit breaks. Likewise, classical gravity theory leads to a singularity — a point where all laws break down. Quantum mechanics turns this end into an elastic bounce.

Traditional cosmology begins with the Big Bang — the idea of Georges Lemaître. However, a new approach, inspired by the work of Stephen Hawking, bypasses the mystery of the initial moment.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the cosmos was like a pot of boiling broth. In it, like lumps of flour, dense clumps of energy — oscillons — curdled and swelled. They grew, gained strength, and soon took over the expansion of the Universe.

According to the Big Bang theory, developed by Georges Lemaître, the Universe began from a hot dense point and then rapidly expanded — an inflation proposed by Alan Guth. Echoes of that time reach us as a faint glow — the ancient light.

In the familiar world, we have three spatial dimensions. However, theoretical physics allows for additional, hidden directions — compactified, that is, curled up to microscopic sizes.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the Universe underwent rapid expansion: inflation. But perhaps it was contracting before that, and then bounced. Both scenarios leave nearly identical imprints on the cosmic microwave background, and cosmologists have debated for decades which one is correct.