Physicist Alan Guth, the father of cosmic inflation theory, describes emerging ideas about where our universe comes from, what else is out there, and what caused it to exist in the first place.

Inflation is now a built-in piece of our standard story of cosmic evolution. But it’s still controversial. In 2014, researchers claimed to have seen ripples from inflation imprinted on the ...

These findings were not what most theorists expected. Today, the dominant theoretical approach combines string theory, a powerful mathematical framework with no successful physical predictions as yet, ...

As physicists continue their struggle to find and explain the origin of dark matter, the approximately 80% of the matter in ...

But far from being a dud, the latest results from the BICEP3 experiment at the South Pole have tightened the bounds on models of cosmic inflation, a process that in theory explains several perplexing ...

We are the Universe trying to understand itself. How, and why, did we come to be? Why does the Universe take the shape it ...

Of particular interest were three manuscripts showing how slow-roll inflation could convert quantum fluctuations on the subatomic scale to density perturbations on the cosmic scale — one by ...