现代宇宙学已经成为一门精密学术研究. 观察数据强烈支持大暴胀宇宙的理论 : 我们宇宙中的一切, 包括空间，基本上都是从无到有的。宇宙的起源可以用量子物理学和爱因斯坦广义相对论以及弦理论来描述。这里介绍这个无中生有的宇宙的故事。

Modern cosmology has become a precision science. Observational data strongly supports the inflationary universe scenario, in which everything in our universe, including space, was essentially created out of nothing. The scenario can be described by quantum physics and Einstein's theory of general relativity, as well as string theory. Here the story how this happened is introduced.

 

戴自海教授，国际知名理论物理学家，研究超弦理论、膜宇宙论、基本粒子物理学。自2011年起至今担任香港科技大学高等研究院院长，曾任美国康奈尔大学物理学教授。

 

Sze-Hoi Henry Tye is a theoretical physicist most notable for his work on superstring theory, brane cosmology and elementary particle physics. He was born in Shanghai and had his primary and secondary school education in Hong Kong. He graduated from Caltech and completed his PhD at MIT. Tye served as the Director of Institute of Advanced Study, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, from 2011 to 2017. Prior to this he was the Horace White Professor of Physics at Cornell University. 

Together with Dvali, he suggested the idea of brane inflation in 1998 in which inflation arises because of the supersymmetry breaking forces between branes. Later, others put the brane-antibrane version on concrete string theoretic grounds. He went on to work out many details of brane inflation with his research group at Cornell. He was responsible for the revival of the interest in cosmic strings. Cosmic superstrings (as strings in superstring theory) are produced at the end of brane inflation, and he has proposed observational ways to search for them. He has also worked on issues related to the string landscape and quantum cosmology.

Alan Guth, in his book The Inflationary Universe, tells the story of how he was led to think about issues that resulted in the original idea of cosmic inflation due to the influence of Henry Tye. At that time they were both postdocs at Cornell University. Tye went to China for six weeks in winter 1979 during the time that Guth came up with his historic inflation breakthrough. "Had he not gone to China, Henry surely would have been a coauthor on the first inflation paper," Guth said.