Hiranya Peiris
speaker
454 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 25 May
Hiranya Peiris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But I went up to Stephen and asked for his thumbprint.
And lo and behold, they actually had an ink pad, because other people probably do also ask for his thumbprint.
And so I actually still have that somewhere.
I visited there to see whether that's where I wanted to go.
And a young professor called David Spergel came late in the evening to pick me up from the train station and take me to a very welcoming group of graduate students.
And again, it was this feeling of belonging.
It felt like I had come to another family.
And David later was my PhD advisor as well.
But I had this gut reaction that that was the place where I belonged.
One of the crucial points that makes my field possible is that light has a speed limit, which means that when you look into the distant universe, you see things as they were in the past.
That's absolutely right.
So the oldest light we can see in the universe is the cosmic microwave background.
So the analysis involved comparing the patterns of the very early light that we can see in the cosmic microwave background with theoretical models.
And different cosmological models make different predictions for the pattern.
It's like a fingerprint.
It identifies the theory.
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.
Showing 361–380 of 454 · page 19 of 23
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