Peer long enough into the heavens, and the Universe starts to resemble a city at night. Galaxies take on characteristics of streetlamps cluttering up neighborhoods of dark matter, linked by highways of gas that run along the shores of intergalactic nothingness.

This map of the Universe was preordained, laid out in the tiniest of shivers of quantum physics moments after the Big Bang launched into an expansion of space and time some 13.8 billion years ago.

Yet exactly what those fluctuations were, and how they set in motion the physics that would see atoms pool into the massive cosmic structures we see today is still far from clear.