Number 71 (Story #3), March 13, 1992 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein THE "TEXTURE" THEORY OF COSMOLOGY holds that in the early universe Higgs fields, the hypothetical fields responsible for disturbing the equivalence of the physical forces, may have taken on different values in different regions of the universe and that at the borders between these domains huge concentrations of energy would have occurred. Such "topological defects" in space-time would exist over a range of sizes and would give rise to gravitational clumping of matter also over a range of scales. The texture theory departs from the inflationary model of cosmology in predicting that galaxies would form earlier and that distributions of clusters and superclusters would be denser. The texture theory also predicts that in general galaxies cluster more densely than dark matter and that unwinding textures would leave behind distinctive hot or cold spots on the cosmic microwave background at a level of one part in 10,000. This latter prediction should be testable as new COBE data become available. (Scientific American, March 1992.)