A Big Bang in a Little Room by Zeeya Merali

Theoretical physicists have grappled for years with related questions as part of their considerations of how our own Universe began. How would we handle the theological implications? What moral responsibilities would come with fallible humans taking on the role of cosmic creators? The issue is not who might be offended by cosmogenesis, but what would happen if it were truly possible. Linde’s referees might have been right to be concerned, but they were asking the wrong questions.

I’ve travelled the world talking to physicists who take the concept seriously, and who have even sketched out rough blueprints for how humanity might one day achieve it. ‘I am not so sure that this is just a joke,’ he told me.įast-forward a quarter of a century, and the notion of universe-making – or ‘cosmogenesis’ as I dub it – seems less comical than ever. Linde changed the paper’s title and abstract but held firm over the line that our Universe could have been made by an alien scientist. The paper’s referees objected to this ‘dirty joke’ religious people might be offended that scientists were aiming to steal the feat of universe-making out of the hands of God, they worried. Near the end, Linde made a seemingly flippant suggestion that our Universe itself might have been knocked together by an alien ‘physicist hacker’. In it, he outlined the possibility of creating a universe in a laboratory: a whole new cosmos that might one day evolve its own stars, planets and intelligent life. He had submitted a draft article entitled ‘Hard Art of the Universe Creation’ to the journal Nuclear Physics B.

Physicists aren’t often reprimanded for using risqué humour in their academic writings, but in 1991 that is exactly what happened to the cosmologist Andrei Linde at Stanford University.

A Big Bang in a Little Room by Zeeya Merali