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Imagine looking out over a beautiful vista. The sun glances off the snowy peaks of distant mountains, a river winds through rolling hills. There is something wonderful about beholding the contours of a majestic landscape.<\/p>\n
It might not be obvious when you look at the night sky, but the universe has a landscape of its own \u2013 filaments of galaxies separated by near-empty voids. We have long known this much. But now one group of cosmologists is taking things further and proposing that the universe possesses not just a landscape, but a timescape, too. The idea is that the very flow of time varies from place to place.<\/p>\n
To say this goes against the grain would be an understatement: we have always thought that on large scales, time runs at the same speed throughout the universe. But in this picture \u2013 known as timescape cosmology \u2013 there are large patches of the universe where time has been ticking for billions of years longer than we usually assume.<\/p>\n
It may sound strange, but what entices some physicists is the simple elegance of this idea. There is no freaky physics involved, it springs naturally from established theory. \u201cIt is part of the structure of general relativity,\u201d says its inventor David Wiltshire at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. \u201cIt\u2019s just not a part of the\u2026<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n