YOU would think that right after the big bang, the universe would have been pretty hot. In fact it looks like things were a lot cooler than you might imagine.
Cosmologists believe that the universe went through a rapid period of expansion known as inflation. But, says Pedro Ferreira at the University of Oxford, they usually ignore the effects of temperature on inflation – and that’s a big mistake. “At the violent temperatures we assume are around at the time, everything would be moving rapidly,” he says. “Space-time itself would be bubbling and boiling.”
Ferreira and João Magueijo, currently at…
