A Classic(al) Story of the Creation of the Universe

In his 1980 book Cosmos, Carl Sagan famously wrote, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Credit: Moritz Kindler on Unsplash If you follow their threads back in time, the ingredients for a deliciously satisfying apple pie - apples, flour, cinnamon, heat, etc. - wind their way back to before the observable universe. Existence was contained in a vacuum then, a void empty except for quantum fluctuations. According to leading cosmological models, the va...