“I think I know how the universe was born,” said Andrei Linde, Russian-American theoretical physicist and the Harald Trap Friis Professor of Physics at Stanford University. Linde is one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and inflationary multiverse.
Since 2009 the European Space Agency’s Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) has been mapping the Earth’s gravitational field. More potato-shaped than spherical, the latest images shows just how different gravity can be at different points on our planet.
“You say to yourself, ‘Here I am, the only one on the planet who knows this thing. Soon the rest of the world will know, but for the moment I am the only one.” In 1969, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind imagined the basic building blocks of the universe as invisible vibrating loops of energy. This insight would form the basis of string theory and help lead to a radical re-envisioning of how the universe began.
Observes MIT biophysicist Jeremy England, who created a huge stir in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics –suggesting that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe.
“It probably bothered the first human beings who realized that the world was not just their local valley,” said Leonard Susskind, the Felix Bloch Professor in Physics at Stanford University. “It probably terrified them a little bit, but by now we’re used to the world getting bigger and bigger. The String Theory Landscape just says it’s way bigger than we thought.”
“I knew, of course, that, at least in our corner of the universe, there are lots more electrons than positrons, but I still found it an exciting idea to think of trajectories in spacetime that could go unrestricted in any direction — forward in time, backward in time, up, down, left, or right.”
