IN THE beginning, space was filled with a liquid hovering below its normal freezing point. Supercooled liquids like this are on a hair-trigger: the merest nudge is enough to set off a runaway frenzy of freezing. That nudge might be provided by a dust-like impurity in the liquid or perhaps by a small region which by chance is a little colder than the rest. Whatever it was, something triggered the cosmic liquid, seeding a crystal that grew explosively, racing outwards.
Does this scenario ring any bells? According to Michael Grady from the University of New York College at Fredonia, it should. He is convinced that the seeding of the crystal is nothing other than the big bang, which spawned our Universe.
As Grady sees it, all sorts of mysterious observations fall into place if our Universe was brought into being by such a phase nucleation event, triggering a transition from ...
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