Imagine looking over a beautiful view. The sun takes a look at the snowy peaks of the distant mountains, a river winds through hills. There is something wonderful to see the contours of a majestic landscape.
It may not be easy when you look at the night sky, but the universe has a full -fledged landscape – filaments of galaxies separated by almost empty empty. We have known it for a long time. But now, a group of cosmologists goes further and proposes that the universe has not only a landscape, but also a landscape of time. The idea is that the very time flow varies from one place to another.
To say that it goes against the grain would be an understatement: we have always thought that in large scale, time works at the same speed throughout the universe. But in this image – known as cosmology of the time landscape – there are great patches of the universe where time has checked billions of more than we usually assume it.
It may seem strange, but what encourages some physicists is the simple elegance of this idea. There is no bizarre physics involved, it naturally springs from established theory. “This is part of the structure of general relativity,” explains its inventor David Wiltshire at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “It's just not part of the …
