Ripples in the fabric of space-time

Ripples in the fabric of space-time | Cosmos Magazine: "When I was a student in the late 1960s, I recall a lecture where the professor explained how nuclear physics, when applied to the first three minutes after the Big Bang, could explain the basic chemical make-up of the universe.



Everyone in the audience burst out laughing: the claim seemed preposterous. In those days cosmology – the study of the birth and evolution of the universe – was barely a science at all, more of a hand-wavy narrative woven around the few known facts.

How things have changed. In March this year a team of cosmologists reported on events that occurred in the first few trillionths of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. And no one laughed."