The Splintered Universe

Abstract

If there were a cosmic complaints department that honored warranties on the Big Bang, the universe would have been returned shortly after it exploded into existence. Most physicists believe that the primordial fireball shuddered through several breakdowns within the very first moments of time. These collapses may have splintered the young universe. riddling it with defects. One might argue that this is just the sort of thing that discourages big consumer purchases, but some cosmologists contend we're lucky to have had cracks in creation. Without matter clumping together in the wake of these cosmic defects, no stars would have formed (SN: 3/24/90, p. 184). Without stars, there would have been no Earth. No Earth, no earthlings. A neat theory, but proving it presents a large obstacle, says one of its originators, Thomas W B. Kibble of Imperial College in London. Obviously, the problem with the early universe is you can't do experiments on it. Twelve years ago, however, one physicist proposed a novel method of modeling the early universe in the laboratory. Several teams have now applied his scheme and are drawing lessons about what may have happened immediately after the Big Bang. Wojciech H. Zurek's idea for recreating the early universe grew out of his eavesdrnnninc at an interrdi5scinlinary physics meeting in 1984. was listening to people talk about Big Bang cosmology. I didn't understand what they were saying, recalls Zurek, a physicist at the Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory. The cosmologists were puzzling over the aftermath of the Big Bang. Following the initial explosion, they asked, why wasn't the sky paved with smoothly distributed hydrogen? How did galaxies come together in the first place, and what herded them into grouped clusters (SN: 9/23/95, p. 202)? Zurek read halfway through one of Kibble's papers, and he began to understand: The cosmologists were saying that as the early universe cooled, it went through phase transitions. As a condensed-matter physicist, he had studied these phenomena. They occur when matter suddenly changes its structure because of alterations in the pressure or temperature around it, such