The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded.
That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s. The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the 1980s, when many cosmologists came to believe that in its first moments, the universe went through a brief period of extraordinarily fast expansion called inflation before settling into a lower gear.
That brief period is thought to have been caused by a peculiar form of high-energy matter
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