Observing the Birth of the Universe

After the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was so hot that light couldn’t shine. As the cosmos expanded, temperatures dropped. Eventually, around 380,000 years following the Big Bang, the oldest known light in the universe appears. Called the cosmic microwave background, this afterglow provides scientists with a glimpse of what happened during the early cosmos.

In this lecture, Lyman Page will discuss the way that cosmologists think about the universe on its grandest scales by painting a physically intuitive picture. In this context, he’ll pay particular attention to how one should think about the cosmic microwave background and its implications for cosmology. He’ll also discuss what current earth-based measurements could tell us about the cosmic microwave background.