Wrinkles in Time

In April 1992 astrophysicist George Smoot announced how he and his team of scientists had found ripples in the fabric of space-time that were made in the first trillionth of a second after the cataclysmic moment of creation. Their discovery of the ripples was central to the Big Bang Theory, which explains why the universe did not remain uniformly smooth, but became the lumpy universe of today, filled with stars, planets and galaxies. By the summer of 1991 Smoot's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite had discovered the tiny ripples that had been put there by the primeval explosion process. Shaped by the force of gravity, the smaller of these ripples have grown into galaxies and the great voids in space. This is Smoot's account of his discovery of the driving mechanism of the universe, a discovery which will stimulate debate for years to come.