Science is Cool: Big Bang Gets a Boost!

I'm not going to pretend I truly "get" all of this. I'm a science fan, not a scientist after all. But it sounds really cool. Sure to tick of a few of the usual suspects though, don't you think?

[Excerpt]

Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun
 
One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics. He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant. . .

Read more at: New York Times