‘Cosmic inflation’: did the early cosmos balloon in size? A mirror universe going backwards in time may be a simpler explanation

By Neil Turok, Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics, University of Edinburgh

We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful “microscope”, the Large Hadron Collider, has found no deviations from known physics on the tiniest scales.

These findings were not what most theorists expected. Today, the dominant theoretical approach combines…

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