The universe is inflating like a cosmic balloon. Lee Cronin, Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, has a new theory about why.

Many scientists believe cosmic inflation is occurring as a result of the Big Bang, but Cronin has a different idea. Time, he explains, may be expanding alongside space. This suggests that time and life may have a deeper connection to one another.

According to Cronin, life could be seen as the amount of selection happening per unit volume, with selection being what keeps the universe inflated. Where there's interaction, there's selection, and, perhaps, this could explain the expansion.

We don't fully understand what drives the universe's expansion or what time truly is. Testing this idea, even if it's wrong, could lead to ground-breaking discoveries about the nature of time, space, and the forces that shape our universe.

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About Lee Cronin:

Leroy Cronin has one of the largest multidisciplinary, chemistry-based research teams in the world. He has given over 300 international talks and has authored over 350 peer-reviewed papers with recent work published in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals, and construct chemical computers.

He went to the University of York where he completed both a degree and PhD in chemistry and then went on to do postdocs in Edinburgh and Germany before becoming a lecturer at the Universities of Birmingham, and then Glasgow where he has been since 2002, working up the ranks to become the Regius Professor of Chemistry in 2013 at age 39.

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About The Well

Do we inhabit a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is love? Is evolution directional? There are no simple answers to life’s biggest questions, and that’s why they’re the questions occupying the world’s brightest minds.

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