AS A teenager, French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet read about the curved space of Einstein’s general relativity. One passage in an astronomy book struck him: the universe, it said, could be shaped like a mollusc. “In my imagination,” Luminet writes, “the space-time mollusc gave birth to a picturesque vision of an immense cosmic snail, its skin streaked through with light, variegated in bends and curves. From then on, I have never stopped seeking to clarify this strange assertion – what is this universal mollusc? – and I have never again looked the same way upon the beautiful skies of my native Provence.”
That…
