Suppose you had a little gadget that could explain all the greatest mysteries of the Universe. Like the scientific equivalent of some ancient oracle, you could consult it to learn how the laws of physics emerged in the fireball of the big bang. Press the right buttons and it would tell you why the cosmos is ballooning outwards ever faster, and why matter, rather than its nemesis antimatter, dominates the Universe. The gadget has already been invented. It doesn't look like much: a blob of helium chilled almost to absolute zero. But according to Grigori Volovik of Helsinki University of Technology and the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow, this refrigerated droplet can help explain some of the Universe's most elusive secrets. It can lay bare the nature of gravity and the intimate workings of black holes, for example. It exposes the newborn Universe to scrutiny and tracks down the origin of physical laws and elementary particles. And the helium oracle has already pronounced on the major quest in physics, the search for a quantum theory of gravity. "It doesn't exist," Volovik says.
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