We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful “microscope,” the Large Hadron Collider, has found no deviations from known physics on the tiniest scales.
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, and “cosmic inflation” — the idea that, at a very early stage, the universe ballooned wildly in size. In combination, string theory and inflation predict the cosmos to be incredibly complex on tiny scales and completely chaotic on very large scales.
