Did the universe have a beginning? What, if anything, came before the Big Bang? Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events ...

Earlier this week, Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin at Tufts University in Massachusetts argued that the mathematical properties of eternity prove that the universe must have had a beginning.

Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin believes the Big Bang wasn't a one-off event, but merely one of a series of big bangs creating an endless number of bubble universes. It is cosmology’s most fundamental ...

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Why are stars and galaxies clumped rather than spread out evenly in space? What drew them together? Thin strings of energy created during the birth of the universe may have provided the attraction ...

Those consequences were the subject of an invited lecture given in March by Alexander Vilenkin at Stanford University. Vilenkin, director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University, is a ...

NATURAL selection has been proved wrong – at least for the ancestry of our universe. For more than a decade, a novel theory that used Darwinian evolution to explain why our universe seems improbably ...

Tufts University is understandably a little ambivalent about its Antigravity Rock. On the plus side, it’s not an unattractive boulder, as boulders go; it has a catchy name and bears a handsome ...

Ever since Copernicus put the Sun, rather than Earth, at the centre of the Universe, scientists and philosophers have suspected that there's nothing special about our cosmic time and place. But two ...