INFLATION

In beginning there was nothing - no galaxies, no stars, no planets, and no life. There was no matter at all, not even tiny particles existed. So how was something as huge and complex as the Universe created out of nothing?

The answer lies in marrying the science of the very small (quantum theory) with the very large (cosmology). Amazingly, quantum theory says that bubbles of energy can appear temporarily out of absolutely nothing.

Normally these bubbles 'pop' as soon as they are formed. In order for one to survive, one of these transient bubbles must have had an intense outward push. Only then could this tiny bubble go on to evolve into the immense Universe around us. Inflation is the best theory to date to describe how this might have happened. It involves a short period of extremely rapid expansion, where the Universe grew by a factor of a 10 to the power 60 (that's a million billion billion billion billion billion billion!). It expanded from smaller than the size of a proton to the size of a grapefruit in a tiny fraction of a second. This then kick started the Big Bang and the creation of everything in the Universe.

This theory has sparked some mind-blowing ideas - including the possibility that inflation may be an ongoing process and not just a unique event that created our own Universe. Somewhere else in the Universe, bubbles of energy might be appearing and creating other universes that grow off our own. And our Universe may have originally budded out from another. We may be just one of many multiverses, in an evolution without beginning or end.