If cosmic inflation, which we need in order to explain several weird facts about our universe, is correct, then this provides strong support for the notion of the "multiverse" the idea that what we see when we look up at the night sky is but a gnat on the back of the elephant that is the true totality of creation. The existence of gravity waves is the "smoking gun" for the controversial theory of cosmic inflation, the idea that right at the start of the universe, nearly 14 billion years ago, everything underwent a colossally fast period of expansion - the "B of the Bang", if you like. It will show once and for all that the notion that our universe began with a colossal explosion of matter and energy 13,978,000,000 years ago - the Big Bang - is correct.īut the implications are more profound even than that. If this is confirmed, it will be the final experimental vindication of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. The announcement confirmed that the Bicep2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation) telescope at the Amundsen-Scott polar base in Antarctica had found conclusive evidence for the existence of gravity waves, colossal ripples in space-time that pervade today's universe and which were formed when the cosmos was just 10 to the minus 35 seconds old – a length of time shorter than it would take the Starship Enterprise to cross from one side of a grain of sand to another. The researchers, headed by Professor John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, appear to have found the very echoes of creation. The phrase "Holy Grail" is being bandied about, and there is talk of the most certain shoo-in for a Nobel Prize for decades. The importance of this finding, announced on Monday afternoon at an excited press conference at Harvard University, cannot be overestimated one leading physicist has gone so far as to describe it as "one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time". Now another team of scientists, this time American and operating a £12 million telescope in the considerably less clement surroundings of the South Pole, has announced the discovery of what may figuratively be described as the fingerprint of God. The smoking out of the elusive Higgs boson, perhaps the greatest recent milestone in fundamental physics, took place in 2012 under the serene and agreeable pastures of the Franco-Swiss border, home to Cern's muscular atom-smasher, the £8 billion ($14.6 billion) Large Hadron Collider.
The most epoch-making discoveries can be made in the unlikeliest of places.
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