Making such strong gravitational waves requires extreme violence, and one can prove that any physical process other than inflation would make predominantly shorter ones. For example, a cataclysmic collision of two black holes squeezing more than the Sun’s mass into a volume smaller than a city can create gravitational waves that the American-based LIGO experiment hopes to detect — but these waves are only about as big as the pair of objects creating them.

That is why my colleagues and I felt so amazed when it was announced that enormous gravitational waves had been discovered. Gravitational waves distort light, and after spending three years zooming in on about 1 percent of the sky from the Bicep2 telescope near the South Pole and taking an even sharper baby photo of our universe, including its polarization, scientists discovered that it was distorted in precisely the way inflation had predicted.

Now what? First of all, we will look forward to seeing whether other experiments can confirm the Bicep2 findings. Because gravitational waves from inflation have long been the holy grail of cosmology, the search for them has been intensely competitive, so if the gravitational waves are as long and strong as claimed, then many other experiments will soon detect them and measure them even more precisely.

Second, this discovery has triggered big spring cleaning in theoretical physics. If the results stand the test of time, they rule out not only all compelling competitors to inflation (including the cyclic-ekpyrotic universe models), but also the vast majority of popular inflation models. For both the Higgs boson and inflation, the original models were extremely simple, and then creative theorists added bells and whistles to concoct countless complicated models during the decades that followed. In both cases, however, the experimental results brought us “back to basics,” agreeing beautifully with the simplest models and chalking up striking victories for Occam’s razor.

If inflation really happened, it fundamentally transforms our understanding of our origins. We need to stop saying that inflation happened shortly after our Big Bang, because it happened before it, creating it. It is inappropriate to define our Hot Big Bang as the beginning of time, because we don’t know whether time actually had a beginning, and because the early stages of inflation were neither strikingly hot nor big nor much of a bang.

Inflation is better thought of as a Cold Little Swoosh, because at that time our universe was not that hot (getting a thousand times hotter once inflation ended), not that big (less massive than an apple and less than a billionth of the size of a proton) and not much of a bang (expanding a trillion trillion times slower than after inflation).

In sum, Bicep2 has revealed that our Hot Big Bang was created by a Cold Little Swoosh, and that although we humans may be small, the power of our minds to figure things out has superseded our ancestors’ wildest dreams.

Max Tegmark is a physics professor at M.I.T. and the author of “Our Mathematical Universe.”