If you’ve been watching the HBO series “Westworld,” you might suspect 3-D printers are starting to do some amazing things. Recently, I journeyed to Brooklyn to watch a whole universe come out of a printer — our own universe, actually, when it was a baby at just 380,000 years old.  My guide was Janna Levin, a professor at Barnard College at Columbia and an award-winning author of books including, most recently, “Black Hole Blues,” about the discovery of gravitational waves.  Dr. Levin is also the director of scientific programs at Pioneer Works a cultural and art center with laboratories as well as studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn, home to the universe-maker. In the corner stood a robot snowman, a “snowbot,” giving hugs to any humans who ventured close.  To cook up her universe, Dr. Levin and her Pioneer Works colleagues used an algorithm devised by physicists at Imperial College in London. They call it Cosmic Sculpture.  The model is based on a map of the universe made recently by the Planck satellite, which shows the residual heat left over from the Big Bang itself in the form of microwave radio waves.  As it came out of the printer, the universe was about the size of a softball, all lumpy and splotchy with features only a mother could love. Over the eons the baby-verse would grow into the starry spectacle we now see when the sun goes down.  Microwave light, which fills all of space, was discovered by accident in 1965, Dr. Levin pointed out. But it had been predicted 20 years earlier, an inescapable part of Einstein’s theorizing.  3-D printers can do amazing things. The Times’s Dennis Overbye talked to Janna Levin, an astrophysicist, as a baby universe was printed up at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.  That makes it different from many explanations of the universe’s origins, such as those one might hear in church. “We don’t have to talk anyone into it; we can just look at the map and it’s either true or its not true,” Dr. Levin said.  At that moment, she was holding the whole universe in her hands.  A version of this article appears in print on December 20, 2016, on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Young Universe, Reproduced in 3-D As a Lumpy Softball. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Scientists have devised a blueprint for the early universe that can be brought to life with a 3-D printer.