{"id":76963,"date":"2018-03-16T17:23:19","date_gmt":"2018-03-17T00:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/to-understand-the-universe-physicists-are-building-their-own"},"modified":"2018-03-16T17:23:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-17T00:23:19","slug":"to-understand-the-universe-physicists-are-building-their-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/to-understand-the-universe-physicists-are-building-their-own","title":{"rendered":"To Understand the Universe, Physicists Are Building Their Own"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/to-understand-the-universe-physicists-are-building-their-own.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Silke Weinfurtner is trying to build the universe from scratch. In a physics lab at the University of Nottingham\u2014close to the Sherwood forest of legendary English outlaw Robin Hood\u2014she and her colleagues will work with a huge superconducting coil magnet, 1 meter across. Inside, there\u2019s a small pool of liquid, whose gentle ripples stand to mimic the matter fluctuations that gave rise to the structures we observe in the cosmos.<\/p>\n<p>Weinfurtner isn\u2019t an evil genius hell-bent on creating a world of her own to rule. She just wants to understand the origins of the one we already have.<\/p>\n<p>The Big Bang is by far the most popular model of our universe\u2019s beginnings, but even its fans disagree about how it happened. The theory depends on the existence of a hypothetical quantum field that stretched the universe ultra-rapidly and uniformly in all directions, expanding it by a huge factor in a fraction of a second: a process dubbed inflation. But that inflation or the field responsible for it\u2014the inflaton\u2014is impossible to prove directly. Which is why Weinfurtner wants to mimic it in a lab.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/to-understand-the-universe-physicists-are-building-their-own\/\">https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/to-understand-the-universe-physi...their-own\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Silke Weinfurtner is trying to build the universe from scratch. In a physics lab at the University of Nottingham\u2014close to the Sherwood forest of legendary English outlaw Robin Hood\u2014she and her colleagues will work with a huge superconducting coil magnet, 1 meter across. Inside, there\u2019s a small pool of liquid, whose gentle ripples stand to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}