Hiranya Peiris

And my job was to build a sort of statistical bridge

between the data that we had measured from the sky and the theoretical fingerprints that we needed to compare them to.

That's absolutely right.

The age of the universe, we were able to put a number to that, 13.8 billion years old.

And we could also measure when this early light came from.

It comes from a time when the universe was about 380,000 years old.

So this is like a baby picture of the universe.

That's correct.

We can therefore tell a story about the evolution of the universe, at least from that early age till now.

Yeah, it's a simple model, but it's a really bizarre one.

It is described by just six numbers.

So we need two numbers to describe the origin of cosmic structure.

Where did everything come from?

Then we have three numbers to describe how it's evolving.

So that's the amount of ordinary matter in the universe.

Everything our world is made of, what we are made of, that's ordinary matter.

It's only 5%.

And then there is dark matter and dark energy, which are very mysterious components of the universe.

The 95%, we can see that they're there, but it's not like anything we know.

And then the geometry of the universe, which tells you something about its fate.