Of course, the Federal Reserve chairman is merely concerned with economic policy and hasn't had to stare down the complexities of how the universe pumped up after the Big Bang.

"We might, in a technical sense, soon observe the beginning of time," University of Washington cosmologist Craig Hogan writes in the March 22 edition of the journal Science.

It was just a decade ago that a National Aeronautics and Space Administration project called the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, began returning data aimed at mapping the universe's background radiation, which was first observed in 1965.

That radiation is residual heat from the Big Bang, the event that sparked the beginning of the universe some 13 billion years ago.

Those ripples are the largest structures humans ever will be able to see, Hogan said. But they also are greatly magnified images of the smallest structures ever visible - the same fluctuations that started out smaller than a subatomic particle at the Big Bang, then were frozen into the fabric of space-time and stretched as inflation expanded the universe to its current size.

Upcoming projects promise even more-detailed information, said Hogan, a UW physics and astronomy professor.

In a Perspective article for Science, he discusses the possibility that new experiments will shed clues about subatomic particles called gravitons and perhaps bring enough information to unite quantum mechanics and relativity, the two great theories rooted in the work of Albert Einstein.

Unlike subatomic particles that make up matter and energy as we know them, gravitons are elementary particles that compose the fabric of space and time.

"No one has ever seen a graviton, but with these new efforts we might," Hogan said. "If you can see gravitons in these maps, then you'll start to see the essence of space and time and matter."

One of these involves the holographic principle, which states that everything that happens three-dimensionally can actually be specified by the amount of information it would take to project it two-dimensionally, like a hologram.

If that turns out to be true, Hogan speculates that all the information needed to show the entire universe during early inflation, shortly after the Big Bang, could have fit on a compact disc.

Whatever is learned from the new research, Hogan said, will lend to the basic scientific understanding of time, space, matter and energy. And while that might sound terribly esoteric, he said, it could turn out to have very practical applications.

For instance, without relativity, backcountry hikers, drivers and pilots - let alone smart bombs - couldn't use global positioning technology.

"If you want to hit a cave in Afghanistan, you need general relativity," Hogan said. "And why is that? It's all based on light traveling through space, and precisely timing the pulses of light."