By Devin Powell
Unable to study the Big Bang in person, physicists have now simulated it in a bit of plastic and metal.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/14222.jpg?resize=300%2C200&ssl=1)
This desktop model tries to re-create the forward movement of time that drives history ever onward. In this experiment, as in many others before, time travel is impossible.
“It’s a toy representation of what actually happens in our universe,” says Igor Smolyaninov, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park who describes his work online April 4 at arXiv.org.