(16.5.2014) It was the science story of the year: Astrophysicists held a news conference at Harvard on March 17 announcing that their South Pole telescope had found evidence of gravity waves from the dawn of time.

Cosmology doesn’t get any bigger than this. The discovery was hailed as confirmation of a mind-boggling addendum to the big-bang theory, something called “cosmic inflation” that describes the universe beginning not in a stately expansion but with a brief, exponentially rapid, inflationary spasm.