The physicists employed a strategy known as the bootstrap, a term derived from the phrase “pick yourself up by your own bootstraps” (instead of pushing off of the ground). The approach infers the laws of nature by considering only the mathematical logic and self-consistency of the laws themselves, instead of building on empirical evidence. Using the bootstrap philosophy, the researchers derived and solved a concise mathematical equation that dictates the possible patterns of correlations in the sky that result from different primordial ingredients.

“They’ve found ways of calculating things that just look totally different from the textbook approaches,” said Tom Hartman, a theoretical physicist at Cornell University who has applied the bootstrap in other contexts.

Eva Silverstein, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University who wasn’t involved in the research, added that the recent paper by Arkani-Hamed and collaborators is “a really beautiful contribution.” Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the work, Silverstein and others said, is what it implies about the nature of time. There’s no “time” variable anywhere in the new bootstrapped equation. Yet it predicts cosmological triangles, rectangles and other shapes of all sizes that tell a sensible story of quantum particles arising and evolving at the beginning of time.

This suggests that the temporal version of the cosmological origin story may be an illusion. Time can be seen as an “emergent” dimension, a kind of hologram springing from the universe’s spatial correlations, which themselves seem to come from basic symmetries. In short, the approach has the potential to help explain why time began, and why it might end. As Arkani-Hamed put it, “The thing that we’re bootstrapping is time itself.”

A Map of the Start of Time

In 1980, the cosmologist Alan Guth, pondering a number of cosmological features, posited that the Big Bang began with a sudden burst of exponential expansion, known as “cosmic inflation.” Two years later, many of the world’s leading cosmologists gathered in Cambridge, England, to iron out the details of the new theory. Over the course of the three-week Nuffield workshop, a group that included Guth, Stephen Hawking, and Martin Rees, the future Astronomer Royal, pieced together the effects of a brief inflationary period at the start of time. By the end of the workshop, several attendees had separately calculated that quantum jitter during cosmic inflation could indeed have happened at the right rate and evolved in the right way to yield the universe’s observed density variations.

To understand how, picture the hypothetical energy field that drove cosmic inflation, known as the “inflaton field.” As this field of energy powered the exponential expansion of space, pairs of particles would have spontaneously arisen in the field. (These quantum particles can also be thought of as ripples in the quantum field.) Such pairs pop up in quantum fields all the time, momentarily borrowing energy from the field as allowed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Normally, the ripples quickly annihilate and disappear, returning the energy. But this couldn’t happen during inflation. As space inflated, the ripples stretched like taffy and were yanked apart, and so they became “frozen” into the field as twin peaks in its density. As the process continued, the peaks formed a nested pattern on all scales.

After inflation ended (a split second after it began), the spatial density variations remained. Studies of the ancient light called the cosmic microwave background have found that the infant universe was dappled with density differences of about one part in 10,000 — not much, but enough. Over the nearly 13.8 billion years since then, gravity has heightened the contrast by pulling matter toward the dense spots: Now, galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda are 1 million times denser than the cosmic average. As Guth wrote in his memoir (referring to a giant swath of galaxies rather than the wall in China), “The same Heisenberg uncertainty principle that governs the behavior of electrons and quarks may also be responsible for Andromeda and The Great Wall!”

Then in the 1980s and ’90s, cosmologists started to wonder what other fields or extra mechanisms or ingredients might have existed during cosmic inflation besides the inflaton field, and how these might change the pattern. People knew that the inflaton field must at least have interacted with the gravitational field. Since fields tend to spill into each other quantum mechanically, when a pair of particles materialized in the inflaton field and got dragged apart by cosmic expansion, occasionally one of the pair should have spontaneously morphed into two graviton particles — excitations of the gravitational field. This pair, and the inflaton particle that remained, would have continued to separate, freezing into space and creating a triangular arrangement of energy concentrations. Meanwhile, if a pair of primordial particles fluctuated into existence, and then each particle decayed into two other particles, this would later yield a four-point correlation.

But while telescopes see two-point correlations very clearly, three- and higher-point correlations are expected to be rarer, and thus harder to spot. These signals have so far stayed buried in the noise, though several powerful telescopes coming online in the next decade have a chance of teasing them out.

Cosmology’s fossil hunters look for the signals by taking a map of the cosmos and moving a triangle-shaped template all over it. For each position and orientation of the template, they measure the cosmos’s density at the three corners and multiply the numbers together. If the answer differs from the average cosmic density cubed, this is a three-point correlation. After measuring the strength of three-point correlations for that particular template throughout the sky, they then repeat the process with triangle templates of other sizes and relative side lengths, and with quadrilateral templates and so on. The variation in strength of the cosmological correlations as a function of the different shapes and sizes is called the “correlation function,” and it encodes rich information about the particle dynamics during the birth of the universe.

That’s the idea, anyway. Attempts were made to approximate the form of the three-point correlation function, but trying to actually calculate the dynamics of interacting primordial particles against a background of exponentially expanding space was about as hard as it sounds.

Then in 2002, Juan Maldacena, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, successfully calculated the patterns of three-point correlations arising from interactions between inflatons and gravitons. Maldacena’s calculation started an industry, as researchers applied his techniques to work out the higher-point signatures of other inflationary models, which posit additional fields and associated particles beyond inflatons and gravitons.

But Maldacena’s brute-force method of calculating the primordial particle dynamics was hard going and conceptually opaque. “Let’s put it this way: It’s quite complicated,” said Gui Pimentel, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam and a co-author of the new cosmological bootstrap paper.

Simple Symmetry

In March 2014, scientists with the BICEP2 telescope announced that they had detected swirls in the sky imprinted by pairs of gravitons during cosmic inflation. The swirl pattern was quickly determined to come from galactic dust rather than events from the dawn of time, but in the course of the debacle many physicists, including Arkani-Hamed and Maldacena, started thinking anew about inflation.

Combining their expertise, the two physicists realized that they could treat cosmic inflation like an ultrapowerful particle collider. The energy of the inflaton field would have fueled the copious production of pairs of particles, whose interactions and decay would have yielded higher-point correlations similar to the cascades of particles that fly out of collisions at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider.

Ordinarily, this reframing wouldn’t help; particle interactions can proceed in innumerable ways, and the standard method for predicting the likeliest outcomes — essentially, taking a weighted sum of as many possible chains of events as you can write down — is a slog. But particle physicists had recently found shortcuts using the bootstrap. By leveraging symmetries, logical principles and consistency conditions, they could often determine the final answer without ever working through the complicated particle dynamics. The results hinted that the usual picture of particle physics, in which particles move and interact in space and time, might not be the deepest description of what is happening. A major clue came in 2013, when Arkani-Hamed and his student Jaroslav Trnka discovered that the outcomes of certain particle collisions follow very simply from the volume of a geometric shape called the amplituhedron.

With these discoveries in mind, Arkani-Hamed and Maldacena suspected that they could arrive at a simpler understanding of the dynamics during cosmic inflation. They used the fact that, according to inflationary cosmology, the exponentially expanding universe had almost exactly the geometry of “de Sitter space,” a sphere-like space that has 10 symmetries, or ways it can be transformed and still stay the same. Some of these symmetries are familiar and still hold today, like the fact that you can move or turn in any direction and the laws of physics stay the same. De Sitter space also respects dilatation symmetry: When you zoom in or out, all physical quantities stay the same or at most become rescaled by a constant number. Lastly, de Sitter space is symmetric under “special conformal transformations”: When you invert all spatial coordinates, then shift the coordinates by a translation, then invert them again, nothing changes.

The duo found that these 10 symmetries of an inflating universe tightly constrain the cosmological correlations that inflation can produce. Whereas in the usual approach, you would start with a description of inflatons and other particles that might have existed; specify how they might move, interact and morph into one another; and try to work out the spatial pattern that might have frozen into the universe as a result, Arkani-Hamed and Maldacena translated the 10 symmetries of de Sitter space into a concise differential equation dictating the final answer. In a 2015 paper, they solved the equation in the “squeezed limit” of very narrow triangles and quadrilaterals, but they couldn’t solve it in full.

Daniel Baumann and Hayden Lee, then a professor and graduate student, respectively, at Cambridge University, and Pimentel in Amsterdam soon saw how to extend Arkani-Hamed and Maldacena’s solution to three- and four-point correlation functions for a range of possible primordial fields and associated particles. Arkani-Hamed struck up a collaboration with the young physicists, and the four of them bootstrapped their way further through the math.

They found that a particular four-point correlation function is key, because once they had solved the differential equation dictating this function, they could bootstrap all the others. “They basically showed that symmetries, with just a few extra requirements, are strong enough to tell you the full answer,” said Xingang Chen, a cosmologist at Harvard University whose own calculations about higher-point correlations helped inspire Arkani-Hamed and Maldacena’s 2015 work.