For those who are bored - why not read about what happened before the Big Bang?
Looking at the inflation era is itself extraordinary, but there is also the possibility that the perturbation the scientists introduced into the inflation picture is an imprint from whatever came before inflation. This is heady stuff, but it’s clear that Kamionkowski isn’t alone in thinking that we can perhaps glimpse some of these early mechanisms.
For a new paper by Jean-Luc Lehners and Paul Steinhardt (both at Princeton) looks first at cyclic universe models in which the universe undergoes periods of expansion and contraction, with a big crunch followed by a big bang marking the transition between the two, and then goes on to posit a ‘phoenix universe’ in which a tiny part of the universe survives the cataclysmic cycling but manages to become the basis for everything in the next universe. Steinhardt has been a major player in so-called ‘ekpyrotic universe’ models (a term meaning ‘out of the fire’), which offer alternatives to standard inflation.