The universe is riddled with inexplicable forces. Something strange is tearing space apart. Something unknown holds spinning galaxies together. And at the beginning of time something only-guessed at- made the whole cosmos go bang. Cosmologists call these three somethings dark energy, dark matter and inflation. But to a large extent, these are just labels to cover their ignorance - nobody knows what caused inflation, or what dark matter and dark energy really are. Each of these phenomena is a deep mystery that could take many decades of careful observations to pin down. Unless, that is, all of the apparently different forces are really one and the same. A single change to the law of gravity might account for them all, if Nima Arkani-Hamed of Harvard University is right. Along with Hsin-Chia Cheng, Markus Luty and Shinji Mukohyama, he has found a new way to modify Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity. At a stroke, it explains dark energy, dark matter and the driver of inflation. In the new theory they are all the result of the behaviour of one omnipresent fluid called a ghost condensate.
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