In 1951 Boris Belousov found that a certain mix of chemicals changed color repeatedly from yellow to colorless and back. It took him eight years to get his finding published, as the editors of reputable journals could not believe it. This class of chemical reactions is now known as Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions.
If carried out in a dish, BZ reactions produce dots that color cycle, concentric rings that ripple outwards and spirals that rotate, until the chemical energy is dissipated.
In the late 1970's Alexei Starobinsky, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde proposed that the universe underwent a period of inflation before the Big Bang, when tiny quantum fluctuations in the fields that fill space w...