A Cold War Among Cosmologists Turns Hot
Two camps of theorists are bickering in public—with one saying the others’ ideas don’t even qualify as science.
In the slimmest fractions of the very first second, the universe grew, and grew, and grew. By the time it slowed down, what had been a tiny, quivering quantum realm was stretched out until it looked smooth and flat, save for speckles of denser matter that later became galaxies, stars, and planets.
This is the origin story of cosmic inflation, a school of thought developed in the 1980s that has itself grown into the dominant way cosmologists think about the beginning of time.
Since it was first worked out on paper, pioneers of inflation like Alan Guth of MIT and Stanford’s Andrei Linde have continued to refine the theory and to advocate for it in scientific and public
