The first moments after the Big Bang, so critical to the universe’s subsequent development, are shrouded in mystery. The theory of inflation, which proposes that space quickly expanded by a factor of around 1026 before the expansion dramatically slowed, makes some appealing projections about the structures and properties we see today. But it’s not known for sure if the theory is correct, and even if it is, many details remain to be worked out.
The problem is that the only universe we can observe is the one we live in. Cosmologists can’t travel back in time to get an up-close view of what happened during the inflationary epoch. And they can’t run experiments to compare what did happen with all the other things that might have happened.
But it may be possible to mimic at least some of the physics of the early universe in another system that does lend itself to experiments. And Heidelberg University’s Markus Oberthaler, his PhD student Celia Viermann, and their colleagues are doing just that with their experiments on a flattened Bose–Einstein condensate of potassium atoms. The idea that fluids—quantum or classical—can simulate the waves and quantum fields of the cosmos is decades old. But the Heidelberg researchers have taken the idea to a new level by creating an experimental platform that can quantitatively explore the expansion of space.
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