Video: Big Bang breakthrough explained with bath towel

Feel like you need a giant IQ to understand Monday’s landmark announcement about gravitational waves from the birth of the universe? We don’t think so: our video (above) explains the breakthrough using nothing but a towel, an apple and a ping-pong ball.

On 17 March, physicists working on the BICEP2 experiment, based at the South Pole, announced that they had glimpsed gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime – dating back to the universe’s birth.


The observation, via tell-tale swirls in maps of relic light from the big bang, represent the first clear detection of gravitational waves, which were first predicted by Albert Einstein.

The discovery also allows us to peer back in time further than anyone thought possible. That could have all kinds of knock-on effects for our understanding of the universe, perhaps even helping to shore up one of the most exciting, and baffling, ideas in cosmology: the multiverse.

The idea that our universe is just one of many is a whole other story, but to get handle on how we got to this point, watch the video.