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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
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.
Yeah, so this is kind of a side project, but my favourite dark matter candidate is called the axion.
Axion particles, if they exist, are very light.
So they behave less like particles and more like a radio wave permeating the universe.
And so you can kind of do a tabletop experiment in a university lab to try to detect this radio wave.
Showing 401–420 of 454 · page 21 of 23
← Previous
Next →