Thirty years ago Alan H. Guth, then a struggling physics postdoc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, gave a series of seminars in which he introduced “inflation” into the lexicon of cosmology.

The Nature Index 2024 Research Leaders — previously known as Annual Tables — reveal the leading institutions and countries/territories in the natural and health sciences, according to their output in ...

Could it be that the universe’s first structures were born not from enigmatic inflaton fields, but from the echoes of ancient gravitational waves? In a shocking shift from the conventional picture of ...

For a fraction of a second after the big bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, most physicists believe, the newborn universe dramatically ballooned in size, jumping from being smaller than a proton to ...

We actually have a pretty good idea of what might have happened before the Big Bang. We define the Big Bang as the extremely hot, dense, rapidly expanding universe that is described by Einstein’s ...