Hiranya Peiris

And then we also need to know when the first stars formed in order to describe the universe.

That's right.

In a tiny fraction of a second, so like a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the universe expanded by a factor of about 10 to the power 30.

That's right.

It sounds like science fiction, but it gets even more science fiction-y than that.

Not only it is thought that the universe expanded that rapidly, but also little quantum fluctuations literally in the structure of space.

have caused all of the structure in the universe to form in those tiny instants and then be stretched out to the size of the whole universe.

Inflation is by no means confirmed yet, but the data is discriminating enough to be able to say something about the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

But there's still quite a lot of work to do.

What I remember about this time is the feeling of working within this amazing team of people.

It felt like our brains were connected like a neural network.

We basically worked around the clock to turn the data into numbers.

It was such an amazing experience that I've not had before in my career or after.

I think Stephen has been quite modest in making this statement because he should be proud of his work in giving us the predictions to test.

You know, science is like a tapestry and he wove a very big piece of that tapestry with his work.

And what we did was to pick up those threads and weave further...

I can give a musical analogy.

So according to inflation, if you represented the universe as a symphony, it should have more bass notes than treble notes.

And a simple idea of the origin of structure tells you that there should be equal amounts of bass notes and treble notes.

But the inflationary prediction was tested and found to be correct by Planck.